Chapter 5 - Page 2

"N-no."

"Does that mean no or yes?"

"Oh, it means no. That is"--she reflected long--"if I had gone back to you I should have been sorry."

"You would have considered it a weakness--a surrender--"

She nodded. "Something like that."

"And you really had stopped--caring anything about me?"

"It wasn't that so much as--so much as that I couldn't get over my resentment." She seemed to have found the explanatory word. "That was it," she continued, with more decision. "That's what I felt: resentment--a terrible resentment. Whatever compromise I thought of, that resentment against you for--for doing what you did--blocked the way. If I'd gone back I should have taken it with me."

"But you don't seem to suffer from it now. Or am I wrong?"

She answered promptly: "No; you're right. That's the strange part of it. After I married--it left me. It was as if old scores were wiped out. That isn't precisely what I felt," she hastened to add; "and yet, it was something like that."

"You'd got even."

She shook her head doubtfully. "N-no. I don't mean that. But the past seemed to be dissolved--not to exist for me any more."

"H'm! Not to exist for you any more!"

"I said seemed. That's what bewildered me--from the beginning: things I thought I felt--or thought I didn't feel--for a while--only to find later that it wasn't--wasn't so." She went on with difficulty. "For instance--that day--that day at the Park--I thought that everything was killed within me. But it wasn't. It came alive again."

"But not so much alive that you wanted to come back to me."

"Alive--in a different way."

"What sort of different way?"

Her eyes became appealing. "Oh, what's the good of talking of it now?"

"Because you haven't told me what I asked--why you married him--why you married any one."

She turned the query against himself: "Why did you?"

"I didn't till after you did. I wouldn't have done it then if--if I hadn't been so--well, to put it plainly, so damned lonely."

She gave him one of the smiles that stabbed him. "Well, then? Doesn't that answer your question?"

He thought it did, and for a while they listened to the blackbird's song in silence. It was their last talk. They parted at the door of the Ritz with the intention of spending the next day in Windsor Forest--or some other romantic wood; but within a few minutes she had telephoned him that the summons had arrived. Next morning she left for Paris.

And so he went to Berne. He hadn't meant to go there when he said good-by to her at Victoria. He had no intention of