so that she thought in terms of other
days.

He raised his head. "What, you speak to me? You said 'Will'? Oh, Aurie,
Aurie, don't!--I can't stand it. I'm not good enough for this."

"What's happened?" she insisted. "Why are you here?"

He sat, his lips loosely working now, his eyes red, his face flabby, his
gray hair tumbled on his temples. It was as though all life's excesses
and indulgences had culminated and taken full revenge on him in this one
day.

"And you can say that to me?" he murmured. It was very difficult for him
to talk. He was broken--he was gone--he was just an old man--a shell, a
rim, a ruin of a man, now seeing himself as he actually had been all
these years--God knows, a pitiable sight, that, for many and many a man
of us all.

"I'm--I'm afraid, Will! Last night--it broke me, someway--I don't think
much more can happen.... I can't think--I can't pull together,
someway.... I was going down to the bridge tonight.... But I thought of
Don."

"But you couldn't think of _me_, Aurora?--Have you ever, in all these
years?"

She made him no answer at all.

"No. You could only hate the thought of me," he said. "What a coward
I've been, what a cur! Ah, what a coward I've been all these years!"

"I wish you wouldn't, Will," she said. Dazed, troubled, she was trying
to think in terms of the present; trying, as she had said, to pull
together. "You are Don's father.... Well, you were a man, Will," she
added, sighing. "I was only a woman."

She had neither sarcasm nor resentfulness in her words. It was simply
what she had learned by herself, in her own life, without any great
horizon in the world.

"It was pretty hard sometimes," said she, after a time, slowly. "I had
to contrive so much. Putting the boy through college--it began to cost
more the last four years--so much more than we had supposed it would.
You know, sometimes I was almost----" She flushed and paused.

"What was it, Aurie?"

"At one time not long ago, the bills were so large that we had to
pay--it was so hard to get the money, I was almost on the point of going
to you--for him, you know--and to ask you for a little help. But that's
all over now."

"Oh, I ought to have come through--I ought to have owned it all up!"

"Yes, Will, you ought."

"Why did you keep it--why didn't you name me? I always thought, for a
long time, that you would, that you must."

"I don't know. Don't ask me anything. But at least, Don's out now. Thank
God