“He was yours in life then, even if for a while he ceased to be. If you forgave him you went back to him. Those whom we’ve once loved—”
“Are those who can hurt us most,” Stransom broke in.
“Ah it’s not true—you’ve not forgiven him!” she wailed with a passion that startled him.
He looked at her as never yet. “What was it he did to you?”
“Everything!” Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell. “Good-bye.”
He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read the man’s death. “You mean that we meet no more?”
“Not as we’ve met—not there!”
He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the renouncement that rang out in the word she so expressively sounded. “But what’s changed—for you?”
She waited in all the sharpness of a trouble that for the first time since he had known her made her splendidly stern. “How can you understand now when you didn’t understand before?”
“I didn’t understand before only because I didn’t know. Now that I know, I see what I’ve been living with for years,” Stransom went on very gently.