," I responded cheerfully, "there's no doubt of
that, you've got me now."

"That's why I'm getting well. How delicious the pines are! and look at
the red-bud flowering there over the fence! It may be wicked of me, but,
do you know--I've never been really able to regret that you lost your
money."

"It is rather wicked, dear, to rejoice in my misery."

"I didn't say I 'rejoiced'--only that I couldn't regret. How can I
regret it when the money came so between us?"

"But it didn't, Sally, if you could only understand! I loved you just as
much all that time as I do now."

"But how was I to be sure, when you didn't want to be with me?"

"I did want to be with you--only there was always something else that
had to be done."

"And the something else came always before me. But my life, you see, was
swept bare and clean of everything except you."

"I had to work, Sally, I had to follow my ambition."

"You work now, but it is different. I don't mind this because it isn't
working with madness. Just as you felt that you wanted your ambition,
Ben, I felt that I wanted love. I was made so, I can't help it. Like
Aunt Matoaca, my life has been swept and garnished for that one guest,
and if it were ever to fail me, I'd--I'd go wild like Aunt Matoaca, I
suppose."

A red bird flew out of the pines across the road, and lifting her eyes,
she followed its flight with a look in which there was a curious
blending of sadness with passion. The truth of her words came home to
me, with a quiver of apprehension, while I looked at her face, and by
some curious freak of memory there flashed before me the image of George
Bolingbroke as he had bent over to lay the blossom of sweet alyssum
beside her plate. In all those months George, not I, had been there, I
remembered, and some fierce resentment, which was half jealousy, half
remorse, made me answer her almost with violence as my arm went about
her.

"But you had the big things always, and it is the big things that count
in the end."

"Yes, the big things count in the end. I used to tell myself that when
you forgot all the anniversaries. You remember them now."

"I have time to think now, then I hadn't." As I uttered the words I was
conscious of a sudden depression, of a poignant realisation of what this
"time to think" signified in my life. The smart of my failure was still
there, and I had known hours of late when my balked ambition was like a
wild thing crying for freedom within me.