"Tearing it down?"
"As a confession that—that you were right. But I didn't know I owned it. Truly I didn't. You'll believe that, won't you?"
"Of course," he cried eagerly. "I did know it, but too late."
"If you'd known in time would you have—"
"Left that out of the paper?" he finished, all the life gone from his voice. "No, Esmé. I couldn't have done that. But I could have said in the paper that you didn't know."
"I thought so," she said very quietly.
He misinterpreted this. "I can't lie to you, Esmé," he said with a sad sincerity. "I've lived with lies too long. I can't do it, not for any hope of happiness. Do I seem false and disloyal to you? Sometimes I do to myself. I can't help it. All a man can do is to follow his own light. Or a woman either, I suppose. And your light and mine are worlds apart."
Again, with a stab of memory, he saw that desperate smile on her lips. Then she spoke with the clear courage of her new-found womanliness.
"There is no light for me where you are not."
He took a swift step toward her. And at the call, sweetly and straightly, she came to meet his arms and lips.