. I don't care."

The chin-strap, the absurd chin-strap, fretted his mouth. He laughed. He
said, "She takes her hat off when she goes into a scrimmage, and she
keeps it on _now_!"

She loosened the strap, laughing, and threw her hat, the hat of a
Canadian trooper, on to the floor. His mouth moved over her face, over
her hair, pressing hard into their softness; his arms clasped her
shoulders; they slipped to her waist; he strained her slender body fast
to him, straight against his own straightness, till the passion and the
youth she had denied and destroyed shook her.

He said to himself, "She _shall_ come alive. She _shall_ feel. She
_shall want_ me. I'll make her. I should have thought of this ten
years ago."

Her face was smooth; it smiled under the touch of his mouth and hands.
And fear came with her passion. She thought, "Supposing something
happens before Friday. If I could only give myself to him
now--to-night."

Then, very gently and very tenderly, he released her, as if he knew what
she was thinking. He was sorry for her and afraid. Poor Dorothy, who had
made such a beastly mess of it, who had come alive so late.

She thought, "But--he wouldn't take me that way. He'd loathe me if he
knew."

Yet surely there was the same fear in his eyes as he looked at her?

* * * * *

They were sitting beside each other now, talking quietly. Her face and
hands were washed clean; as clean, she said, as they ever would be.

"When I think," he said, "of the years we've wasted. I wonder if there
was anything that could have prevented it."

"Only your saying what you've said now. That it didn't matter--that it
made no difference to you what I did. But, you see, it made all the
difference. And there we were."

"It didn't--really."

She shook her head. "We thought it did."

"No. Do you remember that morning I fetched you from Holloway?

"Yes." And she said as he had said then, "I don't want to talk about it.
I don't want to think about it--except that it was dear of you."

"And yet it was from that morning--from five-thirty a.m.--that we seemed
to go wrong.

"There's something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand
going back to it for just one second. Do you remember saying that I
didn't care? That I never thought of you when you were in prison or
wondered what you were feeling? _That's_ what put me off. It hurt so
atrociously that I couldn't say anything.

"It wasn't t