"Oh, it wasn't for the sake of _your_ fine eyes, Mr. I-don't-know-your-name. It was because of her. I could see her saying to her dear little self, 'That woman isn't straight. He isn't straight, either. He won't do.' That's the sort of man she thought you were." "But it wasn't as if she didn't know me, as if she didn't care. She did care." "She did, indeed." "Then why," he persisted, "why did she leave me?" "Don't you understand?" (Her voice went all thick and tender in her throat.) "She was thinking of the children. You couldn't see her with those teeny, teeny things, and not know that's what she would think of." "But," he wailed, "it wasn't as if they were her own children." "Oh, how stupid you are! It was her own children she _was_ thinking of." IV "So that was her reason," he said presently. "Of course. Of course. It's the reason for the whole thing. It's the reason why, when a young man like you sees a young woman like me--I mean like the lady you thought I was--in an over-stimulating and tempestuous place like this, instead of taking off his silly hat to her, he should jam it well down over his silly ears and--quit!" "You keep on saying 'what I thought you were.' I can't think how I could, or why I did." "I know why," she replied serenely. "You fancied I had more decorations in my back hair than a respectable woman can well carry." She meditated. "I thought I could afford a rose or two. But it seems I couldn't." "You? You can afford anything--anything. All the same----" "Well, if I can afford to sit with you, out here, at a quarter past ten, on this old heathenish piazza, I suppose I can." "All the same----" he insisted. She meditated again. "All the same, if it wasn't those roses, I can't think what it was." "Dear lady, it wasn't the roses. You are so deadly innocent I think I ought to tell you what it was." "Do," she said. "It was, really, it was seeing you here, walking by yourself. It's so jolly late, you know." She drew herself up. "An American woman can walk anywhere, at any time." "Oh, yes, of course, of course. But for ordinary people, and in Latin countries, it's considered--well, a trifle singular." She smiled. "You puzzle me," he said. "Just now you seemed perfectly aware of it. And yet----" "_And_ yet?" she raised her eyebrows. "And yet, well--here you are, you know." "Here I am, and here I've got to stay, it seems. Well--before that?" "Before that?" "Before this?" She tapped her foot, impatient at the slow movement of his thought. "Up there in the hotel?" "Oh, in the hotel. I suppose it was seeing you with----" It was positively terrible, the look with which she faced him now. But his idea was that he had got to help her (hadn't she helped him?), and he was going through with it. It was permissible; it was even imperative, seeing the lengths, the depths, rather, of intimacy that they had gone to. "Those two," he said. "They don't seem exactly your sort."