She looked at him again. "But what is really changed?"
"Everything—everything! Not changed, I mean—just gone back."
"To where...we were...before?" she whispered; and he whispered back: "To where we were before."
There was a scraping of chairs on the floor, and with a sense of release Amherst saw that the colloquy in the window was over.
The two visitors, gathering their wraps about them, moved slowly across the room, still talking to the matron in excited undertones, through which, as they neared the threshold, the younger woman's staccato again broke out.
"I tell you, if she does go back to him, it'll never be the same between them!"
"Oh, Cora, I wouldn't say that," the other ineffectually wailed; then they moved toward the door, and a moment later it had closed on them.
Amherst turned to his wife with outstretched arms. "Say you forgive me, Justine!"
She held back a little from his entreating hands, not reproachfully, but as if with a last scruple for himself.
"There's nothing left...of the horror?" she asked below her breath.