Neither spoke as they walked home. When they were in the house again, he unfastened her cloak with awkward fingers, and took the dripping scarf from her wet hair, throwing them on a chair. She leaned her head upon his breast, clinging to him with an inarticulate murmur for forgiveness, and he smoothed her hair for a moment. She raised her face to his to be kissed, and he kissed her. She humbly asked nothing; she would be satisfied with anything now. She went up to her room, as he bade her, and when she was in bed, he came and sat down by her, and held the hand she mutely placed in his, as her imploring eyes asked. But he had to put a force upon himself to do it. The whole play was distasteful and repugnant beyond words to him; it weakened every bond that bound him to her. He sought for no self-analyzing causes. He had so much care upon him now that more than ever in his life before he needed diversion, sympathy, love, rest—rest above everything else on earth. CHAPTER TWELVE To live in the same house, to meet not only at the accepted times, but in all the little passing ways—on the stairs, coming in and out of the door; to meet also in all the little unpremeditated ways that are really premeditated—the going to the library for a book, the searching over this, that, and the other, with all its pretended inconsequence and surprise; the abstraction of two people from the same room at the same time on different pretexts; the lingerings while the minutes grew toward the hour, the sudden hurried partings at a foot-step, the reunion for just a moment more when the foot-step did not come that way—all this unnoticed and casual intercourse with its half-secrecy and hint of the forbidden becomes a large factor in its relation to after-events, when the participants are a man and a woman. There is no influence so little regarded for the young by those in authority as the tremendous influence of propinquity.