The noise of slamming doors and scurrying feet beat [338] ]instead against the stillness, all the echoing movements that strike bare walls when the play is done.
“It was rather funny—wasn’t it?—that I should have believed you that first time,” she went on. “But I told myself what I had seen was impossible; that if I had given up the thing that was life to me, surely you wouldn’t go back to it for the fascination of grease-paint and footlights. Surely you couldn’t seek in another woman the thing you had denied me! That’s why I accepted your half truths—eagerly. Because I wanted to—and one does so many foolish things when one wants to. That’s why it was so much harder when I did find out.”
“Nancy—” he began.
“Please don’t try to explain this away!” came breathlessly. “It can’t be set right. It’s done! And I’d like to go on being friends, because, you see, I did love you.”
“Then—” he seized on the note in her voice.
“No! Never!”
They were just two words, low as a conscience whisper. But they closed the gates of what had been with the grim certainty of fate. His steel-colored eyes—habitually so sure of themselves—wavered. His fists gripped against an enemy unknown. And only the woman whose gaze locked with his knew that the enemy was himself.
He looked down at the blonde head round which the lights of the theater glimmered once more; those lights he had torn away to make her entirely his.
“You mean that?” he brought out at last.
“Yes.”