“You see,” he said, “I thought that it was just that you wanted to get away——That this life was intolerable——That you were——Forgive me if I seem to be going beyond—going beyond what I ought to be thinking about you. Only, why should I pretend? I care, I care for you tremendously. And it seemed to me that you didn’t love your husband, that you were enslaved and miserable. I would have done anything to help you—anything in the world, Lady Harman. I know—it may sound ridiculous—there have been times when I would have faced death to feel you were happy and free. I thought all that, I felt all that,—and then—then you come back here. You seem not to have minded. As though I had misunderstood....” He paused and his face was alive with an unwonted sincerity. His self-consciousness had for a moment fallen from him. “I know,” she said, “it _was_ like that. I knew you cared. That is why I have so wanted to talk to you. It looked like that....” She pressed her lips together in that old familiar hunt for words and phrases. “I didn’t understand, Mr. Brumley, all there was in my husband or all there was in myself. I just saw his hardness and his—his hardness in business. It’s become so different now. You see, I forgot he has bad health. He’s ill; I suppose he was getting ill then. Instead of explaining himself—he was—excited and—unwise. And now——” “Now I suppose he has—explained,” said Mr. Brumley slowly and with infinite distaste. “Lady Harman, _what_ has he explained?” “It isn’t so much that he has explained, Mr. Brumley,” said Lady Harman, “as that things have explained themselves.” “But how, Lady Harman? How?” “I mean about my being a mere girl, almost a child when I married him. Naturally he wanted to take charge of everything and leave nothing to me. And quite as naturally he didn’t notice that now I am a woman, grown up altogether. And it’s been necessary to do things. And naturally, Mr. Brumley, they shocked and upset him. But he sees now so clearly, he wrote to me, such a fair letter—an unusual letter—quite different from when he talks—it surprised me, telling me he wanted me to feel free, that he meant to make me—to arrange things that is, so that I should feel free and more able to go about as I pleased. It was a _generous_ letter, Mr. Brumley. Generous about all sorts of affairs that there had been between us. He said things, quite kind things, not like the things he has ever said before——” She stopped short and then began again. “You know, Mr. Brumley, it’s so hard to tell things without telling other things that somehow are difficult to tell. Yet if I don’t tell you them, you won’t know them and then you won’t be able to understand in the least how things are with us.” Her eyes appealed to him. “Tell me,” he said, “whatever you think fit.” “When one has been afraid of anyone and felt they were ever so much stronger and cruel and hard than one is and one suddenly finds they aren’t. It alters everything.” He nodded, watching her.