?"

"To the dedication, I mean. If it hadn't been all over, would you have
given your consent to that?"

His anxiety had deepened to an agony which seemed to have made his
face grow sharp and thin almost as she looked at him. She judged that
this question was vital, and that the truth was required of her.

"No, not to that. You see, it's only because it's all over that I've
consented now."

"I see; that's the condition? You would never have consented but for
that."

"Why should we talk about that now?"

"I wanted to know the truth."

"Why should you? It's a truth that has nothing to do with things as
they are, only with things as they might have been. Isn't it enough to
be glad that they weren't, that it is all over, and that this is the
end of it?"

Even as she said the words it struck her that there was something
ominous in this reiteration.

"But it isn't all over. This isn't the end of it."

His voice was so low that she could hardly have heard it but for the
intense vibration of the tones. There was a pause in which they seemed
still to be throbbing, but with no meaning behind the passionate pulse
of sound.

"I didn't mean to tell you. I know you'd rather think it wasn't so.
And I would have let you think it if it hadn't been for what you told
me--what I made you tell me."

"I don't understand. What did I tell you?"

"You told me the truth." He spoke with a sudden savage energy. "How
could I go on lying after that?"

She looked at him with that almost imperceptible twitching of her
soft mouth which he knew to be a sign of suffering; and in her eyes
there was pain and a vague terror.

"I might have gone on lying to the end, if nothing had depended on it.
But if you tell me that you only give your consent to a thing on one
condition, and I know that I can't possibly fulfil the condition, what
am I to do? Say nothing about it, and do what you would loathe me for
doing if you knew?"

Till now she had left the manuscript lying in her lap, where
unconsciously her hands covered it with a gentle protecting touch. But
as he spoke she took it up and put it away from her with an
irresistible impulse of rejection. He knew that he was answered.

"If I had," he said, "in one sense I should have done you no wrong.
All this would be nothing to the world which would read these poems.
But when I knew that it made all the difference to _you_--"

She turned, as he had seen her turn once and only Once before, i