"Are you going to return to him—soon?"
"You know it is impossible that I should ever return," she answered. "In his eyes, at least, I have no excuse for what I did—none. He would never forgive me."
"Not if he loved you?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Even if he did—even if he forgave me, I could not return. I left him because I had ceased to love him, because the distance that separated us was too great. I did not understand his way of life, nor he mine. He said things I shall never forgive."
"Not even if you loved him?"
"I do not love him!" she returned passionately. "He forfeited my love. He did not care enough to fight for it. How should I grow to love him again?"
Arnold drove his stick into the soft turf. His face was white and deeply troubled.
"I feel as though I had done you a great wrong, Nora," he said. "I did you a wrong already in the beginning when I tried to force my love upon your inexperience—when I tried to bind you to me without having really won you. I failed, and I was justly punished. But I wronged you still more when I sought you out and offered you my friendship. I deceived you and I deceived myself. It was not friendship, and people were right to give it another name and to look askance at my part in your life. Nora, it is my one excuse that I did not know. I believed absolutely in my own loyalty, until that night of the ball. Then for the first time I knew that I was dangerous, and whether I had been recalled or not, I should have gone away. But Fate was too strong for me. If I had really been your friend, I should not have taken you with me that night. It was a mad thing to have done. But everything happened so quickly that I lost my self-control, my reason. Now I feel as though I had put an insurmountable barrier between you and your husband and had ruined your happiness—perhaps your life."
She had listened to him in unbroken silence, her brows puckered into painful, ominous lines.