"Eliot!" The word came stammeringly from her lips--hushed as one hushes the voice only in the presence of a great grief or of death itself. She bent her head, unwilling to look again on that soul's agony so nakedly revealed. "Yes. I have come back," he said tonelessly. Closing the door behind him, he advanced into the room and came and stood beside her. "Look up!" he exclaimed suddenly, almost violently. "Lift up your face, and let me see what these months have done to you." She lifted her face mechanically, and for a full minute he stood looking down at it, reading it feature by feature, line by line--the proud, weary droop of the mouth, the quiet acceptance of pain which had lain so long in the gold-brown eyes. Then, with a groan he dropped suddenly and knelt beside her, holding his arms close round her, and laid his head against her knees. His face was hidden, and hesitatingly, with a half-shy, half-maternal gesture Ann touched the dark head pressed against her. Moments passed and he neither stirred nor spoke. At last she stooped over him. "Eliot," she said quietly, "tell me why you have come back?" Even then he did not move at once, but at last he raised his head from her knees and met her eyes. "I've come back," he said slowly, "because, though I've doubted you, I can't live without you. I've come back to ask your forgiveness--if it is still possible for you to forgive me." Then, as she would have spoken, he checked her: "No, don't decide--don't say anything yet. Hear what I have to tell you first." She yielded to a curious strained insistence in his voice. "Very well," she said gently, "you shall tell me just what you will." He left his place by her side and went over and stood by the chimneypiece, looking down at her while he spoke, and as she listened it seemed as though all that he had fought against, believed and disbelieved, suffered and endured, was made clear to her in the terse, difficult sentences that fell one by one from his lips.