Silence grew between them like a wall. She lay back in her corner, swathed to the eyes in her white furs; he in his corner sat upright, arms loosely folded, staring ahead at nothing. After a while he rubbed the moisture from the pane again. "Still in the Park! He must have driven us nearly to Harlem Mere. It _is_ the Mere! See the cafe lights yonder. It all looks rather gay through the snow." "Very gay," she said, without moving. And, a moment later: "Will you tell me something? . . . You see"--with a forced laugh--"I can't keep my mind--from it." "From what?" he asked. "The--tragedy; ours." "It has ceased to be that; hasn't it?" "Has it? You said--you said that w-what I did to you was n-not as terrible as what I d-did to myself." "That is true," he admitted grimly. "Well, then, may I ask my question?" "Ask it, child." "Then--are you happy?" He did not answer. "--Because I desire it, Philip. I want you to be. You will be, won't you? I did not dream that I was ruining your army career when I--went mad--" "How did it happen, Alixe?" he asked, with a cold curiosity that chilled her. "How did it come about?--wretched as we seemed to be together--unhappy, incapable of understanding each other--" "Phil! There _were_ days--" He raised his eyes. "You speak only of the unhappy ones," she said; "but there were moments--" "Yes; I know it. And so I ask you, _why_?" "Phil, I don't know. There was that last bitter quarrel--the night you left for Leyte after the dance. . . . I--it all grew suddenly intolerable. _You_ seemed so horribly unreal--everything seemed unreal in that ghastly city--you, I, our marriage of crazy impulse--the people, the sunlight, the deathly odours, the torturing, endless creak of the punkha. . . . It was not a question of--of love, of anger, of hate. I tell you I was stunned--I had no emotions concerning you or myself--after that last scene--only a stupefied, blind necessity to get away; a groping instinct to move toward home--to make my way home and be rid for ever of the dream that drugged me! . . . And then--and then--" "_He_ came," said Selwyn very quietly. "Go on." But she had nothing more to say. "Alixe!" She shook her head, closing her eyes. "Little girl!--oh, little girl!" he said softly, the old familiar phrase finding its own way to his lips--and she trembled slightly; "was there no other way but that? Had marriage made the world such a living hell for you that there was no other way but _that_?" "Phil, I helped to make it a hell." "Yes--because I was pitiably inadequate to design anything better for us. I didn't know how. I didn't understand. I, the architect of our future--failed." "It was worse than that, Phil; we"--she looked blindly at him--"we had yet to learn what love might be. We did not know. . . . If we could have waited--only waited!--perhaps--because there _were_ moments--" She flushed crimson. "I could not make you love me," he repeated; "I did not know how."