He looked at her fixedly.

“Have you forgotten?” he asked.

She covered her face with her hands for a moment.  If indeed she really felt any emotion it passed quickly away, for when she looked up again there were no traces left.

“I have forgotten nothing,” she declared, defiantly.  “Only the horror and fear of it all has passed away.  I don’t see why I should suffer all my life.  In fact, I don’t mean to.  I don’t want to be a miserable, lonely old woman.  I want a home, something different from this.”

Mannering faced her gravely.

“Blanche,” he said, “you are proposing something which would most surely ruin the rest of our lives.  What we might have been to one another if things had been different it is hard to say.  But this much is very certain.  We belong now to different worlds.  We have drifted apart with the years.  Even the little we see of one another now is far from a pleasure to either of us.  What you are suggesting would be simply suicidal.”

She was silent.  He watched her anxiously.  As a rule her face was easy enough to read.  To-day it was impenetrable.  He could not tell what was passing behind that still, almost stony, look.  Her silence forced him again into speech.

“You agree with me, surely, Blanche?  You must agree with me?”

She raised her head.

“I am not sure that I do,” she answered.  “But at least I understand you.  That is something!  You want to go on as you are—­apart from me.  That is true, isn’t it?”

“Yes!”

She nodded.

“At least you are candid.  You want your liberty—­unfettered.  What are you willing to pay for it?”

He looked at her incredulously.

“I do not quite understand!” he said.

She laughed, and the laugh belonged to her old self.

“Indeed!  I thought that I was explicit enough, brutally explicit, even.  What have you to offer me in place of your name and yourself?  What sacrifice are you prepared to make?”

He looked at her furtively, as though even then he doubted the significance of her words.

“You have already half my income,” he said, slowly.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“A thousand a year!  What can one do on that?  To live decently in town one needs much more.”

“It is as much as I can offer,” he remarked, stiffly.

“Then you should earn money,” she declared.  “It’s easy enough for men with brains.  Go back into politics instead of idling your time away down in Blakely.  I mean it!  I’ve no patience with men who have a right to a place in the world which they won’t fill.”

“Surely,” he remonstrated, “I may be allowed to choose the manner of my life!”

“If you can afford to—­yes,” she answered.  “But I want one of two things.  The first seems to scare you to death even to think of.  The second is more money—­a good deal more money.”