“What do you mean to do?” she asked, after a pause.
“I don't know. I'll find something.”
“You won't go back to your work?”
“I don't see how I can. I'm in hiding, in a sort of casual fashion.”
To his intense discomfiture she began to cry again. She couldn't go through with it. She would go back to Norada and tell the whole thing. She had let Fred influence her, but she saw now she couldn't do it. But for the first time he felt that in this one thing she was not sincere. Her grief and abasement had been real enough, but now he felt she was acting.
“Suppose we don't go into that now,” he said gently. “You've had about all you can stand.” He got up awkwardly. “I suppose you are playing to-night?”
She nodded, looking up at him dumbly.
“Better lie down, then, and—forget me.” He smiled down at her.
“I've never forgotten you, Jud. And now, seeing you again—I—”
Her face worked. She continued to look up at him, piteously. The appalling truth came to him then, and that part of him which had remained detached and aloof, watching, almost smiled at the irony. She cared for him. Out of her memories she had built up something to care for, something no more himself than she was the woman of his dreams; but with this difference, that she was clinging, woman-fashion, to the thing she had built, and he had watched it crumble before his eyes.