She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding up the lamp. But in the interrogative light of her pause her companion’s features underwent no change. “The last time? Last spring? But it was you who--for the best of reasons, as you’ve told me--turned me back from your very door last spring!” She saw that he was good-humouredly ready to “thresh out,” for her sentimental satisfaction, a question which, for his own, Time had so conclusively dealt with; and the sense of his readiness reassured her. “I wrote as soon as I could,” she rejoined. “I explained the delay and asked you to come. And you never even answered my letter.” “It was impossible to come then. I had to go back to my post.” “And impossible to write and tell me so?” “Your letter was a long time coming. I had waited a week--ten days. I had some excuse for thinking, when it came, that you were in no great hurry for an answer.” “You thought that--really--after reading it?” “I thought it.” Her heart leaped up to her throat. “Then why are you here today?” He turned on her with a quick look of wonder. “God knows--if you can ask me that!” “You see I was right to say I didn’t understand.” He stood up abruptly and stood facing her, blocking the view over the river and the checkered slopes. “Perhaps I might say so too.” “No, no: we must neither of us have any reason for saying it again.” She looked at him gravely. “Surely you and I needn’t arrange the lights before we show ourselves to each other. I want you to see me just as I am, with all my irrational doubts and scruples; the old ones and the new ones too.” He came back to his seat beside her. “Never mind the old ones. They were justified--I’m willing to admit it. With the governess having suddenly to be packed off, and Effie on your hands, and your mother-in-law ill, I see the impossibility of your letting me come. I even see that, at the moment, it was difficult to write and explain. But what does all that matter now? The new scruples are the ones I want to tackle.” Again her heart trembled. She felt her happiness so near, so sure, that to strain it closer might be like a child’s crushing a pet bird in its caress. But her very security urged her on. For so long her doubts had been knife-edged: now they had turned into bright harmless toys that she could toss and catch without peril! “You didn’t come, and you didn’t answer my letter; and after waiting four months I wrote another.” “And I answered that one; and I’m here.” “Yes.” She held his eyes. “But in my last letter I repeated exactly what I’d said in the first--the one I wrote you last June. I told you then that I was ready to give you the answer to what you’d asked me in London; and in telling you that, I told you what the answer was.” “My dearest! My dearest!” Darrow murmured. “You ignored that letter. All summer you made no sign. And all I ask now is, that you should frankly tell me why.”