"I've been waiting for you to tell me."
He tried to smile.
"You don't know how difficult it has been to come. I've been prowling past—night after night—trying to think what you'd say to me, if I turned up."
"You might have known."
"I didn't—I don't know even now."
She had made him sit down by the fire and she sat opposite him, bending towards him, with her slim, beautiful hands to the blaze. He felt that she knew, for all the outward signs of his prosperity, that he was destitute. He felt that his real self with which she had always been so much concerned had been stripped naked, and that she was trying to warm and console him. She was wrapping him round with that unchanged tenderness.
"It's—it's the old room!" he said.
But his enmity was dead. He was at peace with it. He had been initiated. He had heard, very faintly it is true, but loud enough to understand, the music to which the faun danced. He was not the outsider any more.
"I wanted it to be the same."
"And the house——"