“I can only repeat what I’ve just said. I was hurt and unhappy and I doubted you. I suppose if I’d cared less I should have been more confident. I cared so much that I couldn’t risk another failure. For you’d made me feel that I’d miserably failed. So I shut my eyes and set my teeth and turned my back. There’s the whole pusillanimous truth of it!” “Oh, if it’s the WHOLE truth!----” She let him clasp her. “There’s my torment, you see. I thought that was what your silence meant till I made you break it. Now I want to be sure that I was right.” “What can I tell you to make you sure?” “You can let me tell YOU everything first.” She drew away, but without taking her hands from him. “Owen saw you in Paris,” she began. She looked at him and he faced her steadily. The light was full on his pleasantly-browned face, his grey eyes, his frank white forehead. She noticed for the first time a seal-ring in a setting of twisted silver on the hand he had kept on hers. “In Paris? Oh, yes...So he did.” “He came back and told me. I think you talked to him a moment in a theatre. I asked if you’d spoken of my having put you off--or if you’d sent me any message. He didn’t remember that you had.” “In a crush--in a Paris foyer? My dear!” “It was absurd of me! But Owen and I have always been on odd kind of brother-and-sister terms. I think he guessed about us when he saw you with me in London. So he teased me a little and tried to make me curious about you; and when he saw he’d succeeded he told me he hadn’t had time to say much to you because you were in such a hurry to get back to the lady you were with.” He still held her hands, but she felt no tremor in his, and the blood did not stir in his brown cheek. He seemed to be honestly turning over his memories. “Yes: and what else did he tell you?” “Oh, not much, except that she was awfully pretty. When I asked him to describe her he said you had her tucked away in a baignoire and he hadn’t actually seen her; but he saw the tail of her cloak, and somehow knew from that that she was pretty. One DOES, you know...I think he said the cloak was pink.” Darrow broke into a laugh. “Of course it was--they always are! So that was at the bottom of your doubts?” “Not at first. I only laughed. But afterward, when I wrote you and you didn’t answer----Oh, you DO see?” she appealed to him. He was looking at her gently. “Yes: I see.” “It’s not as if this were a light thing between us. I want you to know me as I am. If I thought that at that moment ... when you were on your way here, almost----” He dropped her hand and stood up. “Yes, yes--I understand.”