"Had it to be?"
"I thought so, then. I haven't always thought so since. Latterly——"
"Go on. Latterly—?" he said, in a dreary tone.
"I have made a compromise with my father about something in dispute between us. He has made me more than independent of him. Isn't it always so in life, that relief comes too late?"
"What did that ever matter, anyway? Wasn't I ready, willing, eager, mad, to take you as you were? Would it have been the first time an American man married an American woman without a penny between them, except what he could earn? The trouble was that you couldn't trust me."
"That I couldn't trust myself," she said bitterly. "I knew my world better than you did, John."
"But you say you haven't always thought the same since," he exclaimed, searching her eyes with a desperately anxious gaze.
"It is not fair to wring from me such admissions. It isn't like you to persist in talk like this. After all, you were the first to console yourself."
His face fell into gloom. He drew away from her and, for a while, sat in silence. Helen turned to look out of the window to hide her gathering tears.
It was a miserable time for both, yet neither would have yielded up an inch of it in exchange for any imaginable pleasure. Helen was thinking, "Oh, that the train would only go on forever, and let me sit by him on this horrid little stool without a back!" and Glynn would have fought any guard or conductor who came to offer them the usual seats among other people. They said very little, but felt the more. At Marseilles, where they went outside for a whiff of soft, delicious air, fancying they smelt orange blossoms, and saw stars looking into the sea, and during the rest of the zigzag run along the lovely coast to Cannes, each knew that the other was dreading the finale of their strange experience.