"Everything? Something you said to me?" "I think so, Bertram." "Did I dream it, then?" She made no answer to this, but her knees failed under her so that she sat down on the bed. Had she--had she said it aloud? "Something like this: 'Bertram, we don't belong to each other'?" He laughed a little on this; even a certain blitheness came into his laugh, as though he should say, "the joke is on you." A sense of the shock she might give him moved her to temporize. "Let us not talk of it now, Bertram. Let it be as it was until you're better." "I'll be a blame sight better after I get this off my system. You see--well I couldn't think just then, but now, when my think tank has resumed business, I savvey a heap of things. One is that you weren't telling me any news." "What makes you say that?" Eleanor bent her grave grey eyes on him. "I had the signal already. I mightn't have seen it fully if this smash hadn't come, but just the same I caught it away ahead of you. That afternoon up on the Las Olivas trail when we came together. When I kissed you." Had she ever let him kiss her? He made an incurved gesture of his free hand, as though joining two wires. "It didn't connect. That's all. I was acting on a hunch when I told you to keep it dark. Told anyone?" Not until afterward did she think to be offended by this question. At the time, she answered with a simple negative. "That's good. It is just between us now. I suppose the matter with me was that I wanted to fly high, and you were about the highest thing in sight--" "Don't, Bertram. I'm not high. Am I hurting you? Oh, am I unkind when you are ill?" "Oh, if you think it's hurting me, you're off. This is a swell way to talk, isn't it, considering that I'm here--" his eyes swept the aristocratic comforts of the Tiffany spare room. "We mustn't think of that. It's too big to think of that!" "I guess you're right. Now that is finished, going to forgive me because I walked over to Northrup?" "I've nothing of any kind to forgive. It's you, I think, that must forgive." "Oh, it's all square, everything's all square. I want to be good friends with you if you'll let me. I hope," his voice was almost tender, "you connect with the right man. He won't have any too much blood in his neck, but he'll have a lot of general culture in his system." Here she realized that she had something to forgive. She repeated, mentally, her act of renunciation as she said: "You're a great, strong, generous man. I can't tell you how much I thank you for the course you've taken to-day. You're going to succeed and--some woman--is going to be proud of you." She had avoided by a thread naming the woman. "I shall be glad I knew you, and I shall be your friend as long as you'll let me." He smiled his old smile and his uninjured hand went out. "Shake!" he said.