But her emotion had swept her out of her course. She found herself at his side.
'Accept it? No! Go away and live in debt. Pay and pay and pay—and find yourself still in debt—for a thing you'll never be able to give me back. And when you come to die'—her voice fell—'say to yourself, "I paid all my creditors but one."'
He stopped on his way to the door and faced her again. 'I'm rather tired, you know, of this talk of debt. If I hear that you persist in it, I shall have to——' Again he checked himself.
'What?'
'No. I'll keep to my resolution.'
He had nearly reached the threshold. She saw what she had lost by her momentary lack of that boasted self-control. She forestalled him at the door.
'What resolution?' she asked.
He looked down at her an instant, clothed from head to foot in that indefinable armour of unapproachableness. This was a man who asked other people questions, himself ill-accustomed to be catechised. If he replied it was a grace.
'I came here,' he said, 'under considerable pressure, to speak of the future. Not to reopen the past.'
'The future and the past are one,' said the woman at the door.