"Let us have our talk first," he pleaded. "I don't want anything to eat until I know—until I feel that you don't grudge it."
"Oh, I don't grudge it," she took him literally. "Not one square meal, at any rate. The only thing I am obliged to grudge is house-room—for any length of time—to single gentlemen. But that is not a question of hospitality, as you know. Sit down, and tell me all the news."
He sat down; she also—about two yards off. Across the gulf of Persian rug he looked at her steadily.
"You are angry with me," he observed. "Why, Debbie? Is it still the old quarrel—after all these years?"
Then her face changed like a filled lamp when you put a match to it. She said, in a deep, breathless way:
"Do you know how many years it is?"
More in sorrow and surprise than in anger, he guessed her meaning after a moment's thought.
"Is that my fault? The number of years has been of your choosing," he pointed out forbearingly. "You sent me away, when I never wanted to go. You broke it off, altogether against my wish. You never relented—never made a sign. Even now I come back uninvited."
It was a clear case, and all he asked for was bare justice.
"Why didn't you come before—uninvited? Why didn't you come back to me when I was poor and lonely? Claud, I have been in every sort of trouble—my father is dead, I have lost all my sisters in one way and another, I have been living in cheap lodgings, doing without what I always thought were the necessaries of life, to keep Francie going and to get debts paid off—I have been ill, I have been unhappy, I have sometimes been penniless, and you have carefully passed by on the other side, like that man in the Bible, and left me to my fate."