m all right! Tell her that, will you, Susy? There are some of our old
times I don't suppose I shall ever forget; but they make me feel kindly
to her, and not angry. I didn't know it would be so, beforehand--but it
is.... And now the thing's settled I'm as right as a trivet, and you can
tell her so.... Look here, Susy..." he caught her by the arm as the taxi
drew up at her hotel.... "Tell her I understand, will you? I'd rather
like her to know that...."

"I'll tell her, Nelson," she promised; and climbed the stairs alone to
her dreary room.

Susy's one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the next day,
should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of "nerves"
to be jested away. He might, indeed, resent her behaviour too deeply
to seek to see her at once; but his easygoing modern attitude toward
conduct and convictions made that improbable. She had an idea that
what he had most minded was her dropping so unceremoniously out of the
Embassy Dinner.

But, after all, why should she see him again? She had had enough of
explanations during the last months to have learned how seldom they
explain anything. If the other person did not understand at the first
word, at the first glance even, subsequent elucidations served only to
deepen the obscurity. And she wanted above all--and especially since her
hour with Nelson Vanderlyn--to keep herself free, aloof, to retain
her hold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wrote to
Strefford--and the letter was only a little less painful to write than
the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not that her own feelings
were in any like measure engaged; but because, as the decision to give
up Strefford affirmed itself, she remembered only his kindness, his
forbearance, his good humour, and all the other qualities she had always
liked in him; and because she felt ashamed of the hesitations which must
cause him so much pain and humiliation. Yes: humiliation chiefly. She
knew that what she had to say would hurt his pride, in whatever way she
framed her renunciation; and her pen wavered, hating its task. Then she
remembered Vanderlyn's words about his wife: "There are some of our
old times I don't suppose I shall ever forget--" and a phrase of Grace
Fulmer's that she had but half grasped at the time: "You haven't been
married long enough to understand how trifling such things seem in the
balance of one's memories."

Here were two people who had penetrated farther