rt fall out, for all the world like the floor of a dump-cart.

"No, no; that's the unforgivable part of it," he cried in quick
protest. "It's not only that I did you a great wrong, Tabby, but I did
_her_ a worse one. I coolly exploited something that I should have at
least respected. I manipulated and used a woman I should have been
more generous with. There wasn't even bigness in it, from my side of
the game. I traded on that dead woman's weakness. And my hands would
be cleaner if I could come to you with the claim that I'd really cared
for her, that I'd been swept off my feet, that passion had blinded me
to the things I should have remembered." He let his hands fall between
his knees. Knowing him as the man of reticence that he was, it seemed
an indescribably tragic gesture. And it struck me as odd, the next
moment, that he should be actually sobbing. "Oh, my dear, my dear, the
one thing I was blind to was your bigness, was your goodness. The one
thing I forgot was how true blue you could be."

I sat there staring at his still heaving shoulders, turning over what
he had said, turning it over and over, like a park-squirrel with a
nut. I found a great deal to think about, but little to say.

"I don't blame you for despising me," Dinky-Dunk said, out of the
silence, once more in control of himself.

"I was thinking of _her_," I explained. And then I found the courage
to look into my husband's face. "No, Dinky-Dunk, I don't despise you,"
I told him, remembering that he was still a weak and shaken man. "But
I pity you. I do indeed pity you. For it's selfishness, it seems to
me, which costs us so much, in the end."

He seemed to agree with me, by a slow movement of the head.

"That's the only glimmer of hope I have," he surprised me by saying.

"But why hope from _that_?" I asked.

"Because you're so utterly without selfishness," that deluded man
cried out to me. "You were always that way, but I didn't have the
brains to see it. I never quite saw it until you sent me down to--to
_her_." He came to a stop, and sat staring at the terra-cotta Spanish
floor-tiles. "_I_ knew it was useless, tragically useless. You didn't.
But you were brave enough to let my weakness do its worst, if it had
to. And that makes me feel that I'm not fit to touch you, that I'm not
even fit to walk on the same ground with you!"

I tried my best to remain judicial.

"But this, Dinky-Dunk, isn't being quite fair to either of us," I
protested,