"Will you never forgive me?"
"Oh yes, I suppose so," said Nancy; and she smiled again.
She thought it funny that this strange man with the square beard and the dangling eyeglass should be asking her to forgive him, and questioning her about love. Nothing about him seemed in the least familiar. His hair, that used to be parted in the middle, now waved back from his forehead; his fan-shaped beard altered his face and made him look like a Frenchman; even his hat, square and high and narrow-rimmed, lying on her chair, had in it an element of utter strangeness.
"What are you laughing at?" said Aldo. And some tone of offended vanity in his voice startled her memory, and suddenly it was up and awake.
"I am not laughing," said Nancy, and she began to cry. That was the attitude that Aldo had expected, and knew how to cope with. A cold, light-eyed woman with an ambiguous smile was an uncomfortable and uncertain thing. But a woman in tears was a sight he had often seen, and he understood the meaning of the bowed head and the significance of the hidden face. He was beside her, his arm round her narrow shoulders. "Nancy, don't cry, don't cry! I have been a brute. But I will atone. I will repay you in happiness a thousandfold for all that you have suffered!"
Still she wept with her face hidden in her hands.
"I am rich. I have more money than we shall know how to spend."
The heaving shoulders stopped heaving. They seemed to be waiting, listening. There was distrust in those waiting shoulders, so he hurried out:
"It is all right. I have not gambled or done anything disreputable. The money has been left to me"—still the shoulders waited—"by a—by—an old person whom I befriended. She has died and left me her money. I deserved it. I was very good to her—"
The shoulders heaved again in a deep sigh. Relief? Despair? Aldo was uncertain.