She shuddered, and pulled her hand away.
"I tell you I've changed," he exclaimed bitterly; "won't you believe me?"
She was crying now.
"You don't understand ... you don't understand ... what one feels about men like you."
He winced.
"You don't know what I felt ... when I heard...."
"Tony!" he cried, "you must forgive me."
"I do forgive you—it's not me you've hurt—but——"
"'But' you don't forgive me, and it is you I've hurt—that's what your 'but' means."
There was another silence, broken only by her muffled crying and the throbbing of the wind in the pine-tops. Nigel felt that his old life was struggling in its cerements to spring up and strangle the new life at its birth.