'Yes. I was not speaking of that,' she said. 'When you take such a tangle into society, it ties itself into twenty new knots. That is all that need be said of the summer and spring. Then I came home.'
'And then I made a mistake,' said Rollo. 'You need not tell me that.'
She sighed a little, answering to another point.
'You could not know that you had started all the old questions again, and that I thought it was maybe your changed point of viewthat made it so easy for you to give me up.'
'But why do you recal all this now, Hazel?' asked Dane, very quietly. 'I never gave you up; it was a fancied somebody that was not you.'
'It came in the course of my story. I could not pass it. Only for that,' she said, turning her face towards him for a moment. 'Because then, in some of those days, I thoughtperhapsI had learned the lesson you set me.'
'And you do not think so now?'
'I am not sure that it was true work,' she answered slowly. 'For in a storm one flies to shelter,and just then my hands sought anything that could stand and would not change. But now'
Dane was proverbially scarce a patient man after a certain line was passed. He left his chair now, stooped and took Hazel's hands and gently pulled her up from her low cushion; and then took her in his arms and held her close.
'I understand all about it,' he said. 'You need not try to tell me any more. My little Wych! Look here; there are just two things to be said, one mediate, the other immediate. In the first place, no uncertainty of motives need embarrass or delay your action in a course that you know to be right. In the next place,Hazel,don't you see, that when we have been married a while and I am become an old story, I shall be more of a help and less of a hindrance? And I know all about you; and I don't know it a bit better after all this long exposition than I did before. And if I have changed my standpoint relatively to some things, I have never changed it respecting you, except to draw nearer. Now confess you have been a foolish child.'