Her words, which he knew to be lies, were still sweet. His heart was filled with unutterable longing, not for “the touch of a vanished hand,” but for a vanished past.
“I will be your friend,” he said earnestly, after a moment. “I have never been anything else, except when I was your devoted lover and foolish husband. I should like to be both again, if I could.”
“Even that might be. There is such a thing as forgetting, you know.”
“Not for me.”
“Then a forgiving.”
“Yes. Until to-night I thought I had forgiven, and I was trying to forget. I shall be glad to be your friend, Sibyl. As to establishing myself in Denver, to be near you, I will think about it. If—if there were no such thing as memory, we might still be very happy.”
His under-current of common sense told him that he had again entered a fool’s paradise.
“We can be happy, Curtis. You shall not leave Denver. I need more than your friendship. I need your love. I tossed it away, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I need your love, and I know you will not refuse it. You never refused me anything; whatever I asked, you gave me.”
He had already given her his life!
In his room at the hotel that night Clayton packed and unpacked his valise, in a state of delirious uncertainty. In the mirror he beheld his face, ghastly as that of a dead man. But, slowly, his philosophy came to his aid,