difference."

He smiled sadly. "You know it _does_ sound as if you wanted to keep
out of it."

"Does it? If I had really been in it, do you think that I wouldn't be
glad and thankful? I am, even for the little that I have done. Even
though I know another woman might have done as much, or more, I'm glad
I was the one. But, you see, I didn't know I was in it at all. I
didn't know the sort of help you wanted. Perhaps, if I had known, I
couldn't have helped you. But my knowing or not knowing doesn't matter
one bit. If I _did_ help you--that way--I helped some one else too. At
least I should like to think I did. I should like to think that one
reason why you care for your wife so much is because you cared a
little for me. There is that way of looking at it." Then, lest she
should seem to be seeking some extraneous justification of a fact that
in her heart she abhorred, she added, "Every way I look at it I'm
glad. I'm glad that you cared. I'm glad because it's been, and glad
because it's over. For if it hadn't been over--"

"What were you going to say?"

"I was going to say that if it hadn't been over you couldn't have
given me these. I didn't say it; because it would have sounded as if
that were all I cared about. As if I wouldn't have been almost as glad
if you'd never written a line of them. Only in that case I should
never have known."

"No. You would never have known."

"I think I should have been glad, even if the poems had been--not very
good poems."

"You wouldn't have known in that case either. I wouldn't have shown
them to you if they had not been good. As it is, when I wrote them I
never meant to show them to you."

"Oh, but I think--"

"Of course you do. But I wasn't going to print them before you'd seen
them. Do you know what I'd meant to do with them--what in fact I _did_
do with them? I left them to you in my will with directions that they
weren't to be published without your consent. It seems a rather
unusual bequest, but you know I had a conceited hope that some time
they might be valuable. I don't know whether they would have sold for
three thousand pounds--I admit it was a draft on posterity that
posterity might have dishonoured--but I thought they might possibly go
a little way towards paying my debt."

"Your debt? I don't understand." But the trembling of her mouth belied
its words.

"Don't you? Don't you remember?"

"No, I don't. I never _have_ remembered."

"Probably not. But you can