Caroline opened her lips to say with passion: "Can't you _see_ what she did it for?" But before the words left her lips, there came into her mind a memory of Laura's face as it looked when she left the door of the Cottage, which was so vivid as to be almost an illusion. Now she knew what the anxious, uncertain gaze of those brown eyes into her own had really meant. Laura had been trying to say all the time: "Don't tell him! don't tell him!" But the complexities involved had been too great, when it came to the point, for anything to be actually said. Caroline waited to get back her self-command, stirred by a sudden loyalty to her own sex which made her long to pierce his masculine obtuseness--to show him what Laura had sacrificed and what he had missed. And as he watched her, he wondered once more at the quality of aloofness--of something fresh and cool despite her passion--which had caused him to think of a nymph on fire when he first held her in his arms. "Well?" he said at last. "It's all right now, isn't it?" She shook her head. "I'm not going to begin that all over again," she said rather drearily. "You made me look silly once, but you won't have a chance a second time. So long as you thought you might marry Miss Laura, you were afraid of the talk and kept out of my way. Now she has turned you down, you come after me again. I don't know why. Just for your own fun, I suppose. You can't deny you avoided me." "No." He stood with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. "I don't. But I was in a devil of a hole, Caroline. I was engaged to marry a good girl, and a nice girl, and shortly after the wedding day was fixed I did a thing which only a cad would have done." He paused, Caroline gazing at him with wide eyes. Then he went on: "I borrowed a large sum of money from her." "Is that all?" breathed Caroline. "I don't see what difference that made." "Don't you? Well, perhaps not--but any man would," he answered. "I was faced with ruin unless I could tide things over, and I couldn't take the money and be philandering with another girl at the same time." "You didn't seem to hold those views until the last week or two," she said. "I had not borrowed the money before," he said shortly. "Though I knew well enough I was not doing the square thing there, either by you or her." She looked at him with a keen, set, impersonal intentness in her gaze which he could not understand. "Then you are sure she does not care enough for you to marry you? She threw you over because she wanted to stop single?" "No doubt of that," he said with a sort of rueful conviction. "Though, of course, being the girl she is, she was frightfully upset at the idea of behaving badly to me. As a matter of fact, she seemed so distressed during the whole interview that I couldn't help feeling ashamed of myself. I couldn't let her reproach herself so acutely; I had to tell her I--I wasn't broken-hearted."