'Does it make no difference? I don't know.' He came across to Trix. 'We've travelled the bad road together, you and I,' he said softly. 'I may have seen her far off—against the sky—and steered a course by hers. The course isn't everything. But for your arm I should have fallen by the way. And—should you never have fallen if you'd been quite alone? Or did you fall and need to be picked up again?'
He took both her hands and she let them lie in his; but she still looked at him in fear and doubt, unable to rise to his serenity, unable to put the past behind her as he did. The spectres rose and seemed to bar the path, crying to her that she had no right to tread it.
'I've grown so hard, I've been so hard. Can I forget what I've been and what I've done? Sha'n't I always hear them accusing me? Can I trust myself not to want to go back again? It seems to me that I've lost the power of doing what you say.'
'Never,' said Airey confidently. 'Never!' His smile broke out again. 'Well, certainly not your side of thirty,' he amended, trying to make her laugh.
'Oh, ask Mrs. Bonfill, or Lord Mervyn, or Beaufort Chance of me!'
'They'd all tell me the truth of what they know, I don't doubt it.'
'And you know it too!' she cried, in a sort of shrinking wonder.
'To be sure I know it,' he agreed cheerfully. 'Wasn't I walking beside you all the way?'
'Tell me,' she said. 'If you'd really been a very poor man, as we all believed you were, would you ever have thought it wise or possible to marry a woman like me?'
She had an eye for a searching question. Airey perceived that.