"He didn't lie," she said at last. "Oh, you'd have known it sooner or later. No! no! He didn't lie." "Claire-Anne!" "He didn't lie. I was just a fool to think--oh, well, he didn't lie. No, no!" she repeated. "He didn't lie." She threw out a hand hopelessly. "He didn't lie." He went up to her in the dusk, put his hands gently on her shoulders. The quivering frame became still suddenly, with a greater nervousness. She was like a deer ready to bound away.... "I don't see what I could have done, Claire-Anne. But--can I do anything now?" She turned toward him suddenly. Her face was a mask of pain--and surprise. "Then you haven't grown cold to me, unmerciful, ... or gross?" "Why, no, Claire-Anne!" "And you know." "I--know, but I don't understand...." She gave a queer, little shuddering cry, half laugh, half sob. She moved over to the seat by the whispering mulberry-tree, and dropped in it, her hands covering her face. "All the wrong," she said, "that people call wrong I've done I didn't mind. But the one decent thing--of loving you--that's kept me awake all the time you were away. It's been like a sin, letting you love me. The rest was destiny, but this one thing was--I." She suddenly raised her face, her eyes shining through the humid mask of it. "Would you--could you--understand?" "Tell me, Claire-Anne, what you want to." She drew a short gasping breath, turned her head away, looked up, turned it away again, paused for breath, gripped his hand by the wrist.... "I ... I ... I was the child of actors, and they died, and there was enough money to bring me up and educate me, and give me my chance on the stage.... And I wasn't good enough.... I was too much myself. Couldn't quite be other characters. I don't know if you understand.... But ... then a man got infatuated with me and married me.... And later he wished he'd married a--comfortable woman with a fortune.... And then he died and left me ... not very much.... But that was not the reason.... I was left, how do you say?... stranded. I had no career, no husband, no child, no business. France, it is not easy ... not easy anywhere.... Friends? People are too busy.... And I was ... just there.... And all around me life bubbled and flowed, and I was ... not dead, not alive ... and alone ... I might have been a leper, but even lepers have colonies, and some one to be kind to them ... not dead, not alive ... and alone. I was so young.... It was unfair. Life was everywhere like a sparkling wine ... but where I was, was flat....