How much more she did not tell him. She said nothing of Fricker, nothing of ruin; and no rumours had reached Danes Inn. He saw that her vanity was wounded, he guessed that perhaps her affections might be; but he treated her still as the well-off fashionable woman who for a whim came to visit his poor lodgings, just as she still treated him as the poverty-stricken man who might advise others well or ill, but anyhow made little enough out of the world for himself.
'Well, you seem quite happy without these vanities,' she said. 'Why shouldn't I be?' She leant back and seemed to look at him with a grateful sense of peace and quiet. 'And you don't abuse me! You must know I've been very bad, but you greet me like a friend.'
'Your badness is nothing to me, if you have been bad.'
'Is that indifference—or fidelity?' she asked, lightly still, but with a rather anxious expression in her eyes.
For a moment he was silent, staring out of his big window into the big window opposite. In the end he did not answer her question, but put one in his turn:—
'So you hold me responsible?'
There must have been something more than raillery in her original charge, for when he put his question gravely she answered it in a like way.
'You touched some impulse in me that hadn't been touched before. Of course you didn't mean to do it. You didn't know the sort of person you were talking to. But I thought over what you said, and it chimed in with something in me. So I went and—and had my fling.'
'Ah!' he murmured vaguely, but he turned now and looked at her.