“I am glad you told me; but you are taking it hard now because Joe is so ill. You have no right to accuse yourself; you and Joe are wholly different; your marriage was a boy-and-girl affair and utterly unfit. The law has freed you, as it should free people who make such mistakes. You have the ambition and ability to do something in the world. Joe is a good boy but he could never tiptoe up to you. You did only the right thing,” Wayne ran on glibly. “Your life is your own to do with as you like: you would have no right to throw it away or waste it.” The unreality of a situation in which he was weighing right and wrong for another was not lost on him; and he was fully conscious that his words made no impression on her. She was intent with her own thoughts and her eyes rested upon him unseeingly. She had hinted before at reasons why they should not know each other, but he had assumed that these were chiefly his own reputation and the divergent paths to which they were born. But he knew now that she was a divorced woman; she had been the wife of a coal miner, a ball player, his own servant. These facts swept in review before him and he met them with full gaze, giving full value to every point. She was young, and they exercised on each other an attraction with which it might be possible to trifle; and yet no evil thought came into his heart. She had opened the slender book of her life to its marred page; her life, like his, had failed at the start; but into this knowledge he read a new kinship between them. He attempted to reason her out of her position and failed. “It was wrong; it was a great sin,” she persisted. Suddenly he stood at her side and seized her hands. “Jean! Jean! You are a free woman. You mean all there is in the world to me of purity and goodness and sweetness. I need you! I need you! And I believe you need me. Let us begin our lives again, Jean. I will be so good to you; I will love you so much--so much.” But she flung open the door behind her. “You must go,” she said, with averted head; “you must go!” “But you are wrong; oh, you are very wrong, Jean! You care; I know you care. I want you to belong to me,” he whispered. “I have my own duty; I see it clearly now. I have been wicked and selfish. I thought only of myself when I left Joe; and if he should die now it would be my fault, my sin.” Her distress was great and the tears coursed down her cheeks. Then she threw up her head in the way he loved. Her lips trembled but there was no mistaking her words. “I’m going back to Joe; I’m going back to him.” CHAPTER XXVIII CLOSED DOORS