She smiled at him, her face radiant.
“I want—I want just to pretend that it all never happened. I want, just once, to sit with you by the fireside as though I had been here all these years—as though you and I had learned to be the comrades I had dreamed we should be. I want to sit with you as we should have sat, both of us now growing old, looking back on all the beautiful things of our life together. Harry!” She lifted her arms to him again, yearning out to him. “Just once—just once to pretend—to be as we might have been—and then I can go away and really and truly die, satisfied. Be generous, Harry, be generous just this once if you never are again.”
An obscure feeling stirred in him, a sense of tears that threatened as he looked down into the eyes that swam with moisture.
“You nearly broke my life, Christine,” he said, with a hardly achieved attempt at harshness.
“I want to forget it,” she answered. “To believe—for just one hour—that I made your life, as I wanted to help make it. Oh, Harry, Harry, I love you—I have always loved you, wherever I have been and whatever I have done—and I want to believe, oh, for just such a little minute, that my love was not really in vain. I just had to come!”
He pressed his hand over his eyes, did not answer.
She pointed to the comrade chair by the fireside.
“Harry—Harry dear—sit down and talk to me as we ought to have been able to sit and talk—old married lovers with never a cloud between us.”
“Oh—don’t!” he said. “Don’t, Christine!” He burst out with a sudden anger. “Why have you come back? I—I wanted to forget, forget always.”
She reached for his hand, touched it with fingers that were still cold.