“I have been in a country where one forgets,” he answered. “I think that I have thrown the knapsack of my follies away. I think that it is buried. There are some things which I do not forget, but they are scarcely to be spoken of.”
“You are a strange young man,” she said. “Was I wrong, or were you not once in love with me?”
“I was terribly in love with you,” Tavernake confessed.
“Yet you tore up my cheque and flung yourself away when you found out that my standard of morals was not quite what you had expected,” she murmured. “Haven't you got over that quixoticism a little, Leonard?”
He drew a deep sigh.
“I am thankful to say,” he declared, earnestly, “that I have not got over it, that, if anything, my prejudices are stronger than ever.”
She sat for a moment quite still, and her face had become hard and expressionless. She was looking past him, past the line of lights, out into the blue darkness.
“Somehow,” she said, softly, “I always prayed that you might remember. You were the one true thing I had ever met, you were in earnest. It is past, then?”
“It is past,” Tavernake answered, bravely.
The music of a Hungarian waltz came floating down to them. She half closed her eyes. Her head moved slowly with the melody. Tavernake looked away.