"I will tell you why I ceased to write. Every letter which you wrote to me when I was in New York was more contemptuous than the letter which had preceded it. I had failed, and you despised me for my failure. I had allowed myself to be tricked out of your money----" And upon that Millie interrupted him-- "Oh no!" she cried; "you must not say that I despised you for that. No! That is not fair. I never thought of the money. I offered you what was left." Tony had put himself in the wrong here. He recognised his mistake, he accepted Millie's correction. "Yes, that is true," he said; "you offered me all that was left--but you offered it contemptuously; you had no shadow of belief that I would use it to advantage--you had no faith in me at all. In your eyes I was no good. Mind, I don't blame you. You were justified, no doubt. I had set out to make a home for you, as many a man has done for his wife. Only where they had succeeded I had failed. If I thought anything at all----" he said, with an air of hesitation. "Well?" asked Millie. "I thought you might have expressed your contempt with a little less of unkindness, or perhaps have hidden it altogether. You see, I was not having an easy time in New York, and your letters made it very much harder." "Oh, Tony," she said, in a low voice of self-reproach. She was sitting with her hands clenched in front of her upon the table-cloth, her forehead puckered, and in her eyes a look of great pain. "Never mind that," he replied; and he resumed his story. "I saw then quite clearly that with each letter which you received from me, each new instalment of my record of failure--for each letter was just that, wasn't it?--your contempt grew. I was determined that if I could help it your contempt should not embitter all our two lives. So I ceased to write. For the same reason I stayed away, even after my father had died. Had I come back then I should have come back a failure, proved and self-confessed. And your scorn would have stayed with you. My business henceforth was to destroy it, to prove to you that after all I was some good--if not at money-making, at something else. I resolved that we should not live together again until I could come to you and say, 'You have no right to despise me. Here's the proof.'" Millie was learning now, even as Tony had learnt a minute ago. All that he said to her was utterly surprising and strange. He had been thinking of her, then, all the time while he was away! Indifference was in no way the reason of his absence. "Oh, why did you not write this to me?" she cried. "It need not have been a long letter, since you were unwilling to write. But just this you might have written. It would have been better, kinder"--and she paused upon the word, uttering it with hesitation and a shy deprecating smile, as though aware that she had no claim upon his kindness. "It would have been kinder than just to leave me here, not knowing where you were, and thinking what I did."