"I've been all right," she answered, "only there was nothing to write about."
But he would not be put off like that, and at last, with a sob, she told him. "It's over now, and I didn't mean you to know. I—I've had the brokers in." She was speaking hurriedly, in a low voice. "You see, someone has been paying my rent, and I expected it the day you went away—it should have come that morning—and it was due next day. I never heard, and I only had a few shillings, so they put the brokers in at once. These landlords always do."
Jimmy cursed silently. "Why didn't you wire to me? You know I would have sent it at once."
She shook her head. "No, no. I hate taking money from you, above everyone."
"What did you do in the end?"
She looked up and faced him, with a kind of desperate courage. "I got it by going away for two days. It's no good disguising things, trying to make out that I don't."
It was a question which was the paler, the man or the woman. It had come home to him, as it had never done before. He dropped her hands and went over to the window, where he stood very still, staring out with absolutely unseeing eyes; whilst she watched him with a deadly pain at her heart, thinking she had killed the love which she knew had grown up in him.
"Perhaps it's best, after all, perhaps it's best." She tried desperately hard to say the words to herself, then, almost unconsciously, she took a step towards him. Possibly her action altered the whole course of two lives, for, like a flash, he turned round, seized her in his arms, and covered her face with kisses.
"I don't care, now I've come back, because it'll never happen again, it can't happen again, and what went before has nothing to do with me. We'll start afresh, dearest, we'll start afresh." He repeated the words several times, savagely, as though wishing to assure himself that it would be so.