"But even so--if you believed it--but how could you? Even so--why not have told me--why not have given me a chance?" His voice trembled. Hers was firm. "I _was_ giving you a chance, and I wanted to make sure that you would take it. If I'd just said, 'You don't care for me,' you'd have said, 'Oh, yes I do!' And we should have been just where we were before." "Then it wasn't that you were tired of me?" "Oh, no," she said sedately, "it wasn't that!" "Then you--did you really care for me still, even when you sent back the ring and wouldn't see me, and went to Germany, and wouldn't open my letters, and all the rest of it?" "Oh, yes!"--she laughed lightly--"I loved you frightfully all that time. It does seem odd now to look back on it, doesn't it? but I nearly broke my heart over you." "Then why the devil--" "You mustn't swear," she interrupted; "I never heard you do that before. Is it the Indian climate?" "Why did you send me away?" he repeated. "Don't I keep telling you?" Her tone was impatient. "I found out you didn't care, and--and I'd always despised people who kept other people when they wanted to go. And I knew you were too honourable, generous, soft-hearted--what shall I say?--to go for your own sake, so I thought, for your sake, I would make you believe you were to go for mine." "So you lied to me?" "Not exactly. We _weren't_ suited--since you didn't love me." "_I_ didn't love you?" he echoed again. "And somehow I'd always wanted to do something really noble, and I never had the chance. So I thought if I set you free from a girl you didn't love, and bore the blame myself, it _would_ be rather noble. And so I did it." "And did the consciousness of your own nobility sustain you comfortably?" The sneer was well sneered. "Well--not for long," she admitted. "You see, I began to doubt after a while whether it was really _my_ nobleness after all. It began to seem like some part in a play that I'd learned and played--don't you know that sort of dreams where you seem to be reading a book and acting the story in the book at the same time? It was a little like that now and then, and I got rather tired of myself and my nobleness, and I wished I'd just told you, and had it all out with you, and both of us spoken the truth and parted friends. That was what I thought of doing at first. But then it wouldn't have been noble! And I really did want to be noble--just as some people want to paint pictures, or write poems, or climb Alps. Come, take me back to the ball-room. It's cold here in the Past." But how could he let the curtain be rung down on a scene half finished, and so good a scene? "Ah, no! tell me," he said, laying his hand on hers; "why did you think I didn't love you?"