“Of your good luck, I mean.... I’ve heard, of course.” And now she had him, for the first time, actually reddening and stammering as she herself used to do, and catching at the splinters of his own words! Ah, the trick was done--she could even see, as they continued to face each other in the searching spring light, that he had reddened, thickened, hardened--as if the old Chris had been walled into this new one, and were not even looking at her out of the windows of his prison. “My good luck?” she echoed again, while the truth still danced in her ears: the truth that she was free, free, free--away from him at last, far enough off to see him and judge him! It must have been his bad taste--the bad taste that could lead him into such an opening as that--which, from the very first, she had felt in him, and tried not to feel, even when she was worshipping him most blindly. But, after all, if she felt so free, why be so cruel? Ah, because the terror was still there--it had only shifted its ground. What frightened her now was not the thought of their past but of their future. And she must not let him see that it frightened her. What had his last words been? Ah, yes--. She answered: “Of course I’m very happy to be at home again.” He lowered his voice to murmur: “And I’m happy _for_ you.” Yes; she remembered now; it was always in emotional moments that his tact failed him, his subtlety vanished, and he seemed to be reciting speeches learned by heart out of some sentimental novel--the very kind he was so clever at ridiculing. They continued to stand facing each other, their inspiration spent, as if waiting for the accident that had swept them together to whirl them apart again. Suddenly she risked (since it was better to know): “So you’re living now in New York?” He shook his head with an air of melancholy. “No such luck. I’m back in Baltimore again. Come full circle. For a time, after the war, I was on a newspaper there; interviewing film-stars and base-ball fans and female prohibitionists. Then I tried to run a Country Club--awful job! All book-keeping, and rows between members. Now Horace Maclew has taken pity on me; I’m what I suppose you’d call his private secretary. No eight-hour day: he keeps me pretty close. It’s only once in a blue moon I can get away.”