"It was easily done, a light grey felt thing with a rakish brim--a travelling hat, I realised with a shock! My eyes followed it as she threw it on to the table, and my mind lost all the ease which I had managed to collect. She saw that, I suppose, for as she patted her hair she was looking at me with a queer, understanding, hopeless smile. "'Fay, you're not going--just now?' I blurted out. "'I called here on my way to the station,' she told me very evenly. "I couldn't help it, I said again, 'You beast, Fay!' "'But you don't understand, my dear' she protested quickly; and with an adorable gesture she stretched out a hand, three fingers of a gloved hand, and ran them thoughtfully down my arm. 'Won't you understand at all? Why I've come to see you on my last night in England instead of--instead of on my first?' "She seemed to plead, a suppliant before me staring cruelly down at her. I didn't understand. "'If I had seen you on my first night,' she tried to explain, 'why, I might have been tempted to go on seeing you, again and again, for ever and ever, Howard!... Oh, don't you understand?' And she asked that with a sort of breathless, childish pleading in her voice--illuminating even to my bitterness! But I couldn't, just then, let a pleading voice make me forgive so easily. "'And so, in case you might be tempted,' I said, like any cad, 'you come to see me on your way to the train!' "'But my train doesn't go until 7 o'clock in the morning,' she said.... A slave to that wonderful moment, I took her and kissed her lips. "Those few hours explained Fay Richmond--the girl I had known so well, the woman I loved.... And who loved me! There lay the unforgivable wonder." And for the first time, on that passionate regret, Howard Wentworth broke in on his tale. With elbows on his knees and hands clasped, he leant forward in his arm-chair (one of those creaking wicker things which only poor men and rich nursing-homes have) and earnestly pointed his haggard convalescent face at me.