“No, you had no word. I kept my vow,” he said.

“Your vow?”

“That you shouldn’t have a word—not a syllable. Oh, I kept it through everything!”

Lizzie’s heart was sounding in her ears the old confused rumor of the sea of life, but through it she desperately tried to distinguish the still small voice of reason.

“What was your vow? Why shouldn’t I have had a syllable from you?”

He sat motionless, still holding her with a look so gentle that it almost seemed forgiving.

Then abruptly he rose, and crossing the space between them, sat down in a chair at her side. The deliberation of his movement might have implied a forgetfulness of changed conditions, and Lizzie, as if thus viewing it, drew slightly back; but he appeared not to notice her recoil, and his eyes, at last leaving her face, slowly and approvingly made the round of the small bright drawing-room. “This is charming. Yes, things have changed for you,” he said.

A moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of a vain return upon the past. It was as if all her retrospective tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to protect him from it. But his evasiveness exasperated her, and suddenly she felt the inconsistent desire to hold him fast, face to face with his own words.

Before she could reiterate her question, however, he had met her with another.

“You did think of me, then? Why are you afraid to tell me that you did?”

The unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.

“Didn’t my letters tell you so enough?”

“Ah, your letters!” Keeping her gaze on his in a passion of unrelenting fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not the least quiver of a sensitive nerve. He only gazed back at her more sadly.

“They went everywhere with me—your letters,” he said.

“Yet you never answered them.” At last the accusation trembled to her lips.

“Yet I never answered them.”

“Did you ever so much as read them, I wonder?”

All the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed them on him, as if to escape from their rage.

Deering hardly seemed to hear her question. He merely shifted his attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by the least gesture, to remind her of the privileges which such nearness had once implied.

“There were beautiful, wonderful things in them,” he said, smiling.

She felt herself stiffen under his smile.

“You’ve waited three years to tell me so!”

He looked at her with grave surprise. “And do you resent my telling you even now?”

His parries were incredible. They left her with a breathless sense of thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindictive desire to drive him against the wall and pin him there.

“No. Only I wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at the time—”