“I see,” he repeated—“I see.” But he was in that light again mystified. “Then why are you therefore not free?”
“Because—just after—you came back, and I did see you again!”
Ah, it was all present. “You found you were too sorry for me?”
“I found I was too sorry for you—as he himself found I was.”
Hugh had got hold of it now. “And that, you mean, he couldn’t stomach?”
“So little that when you had gone (and how you had to go you remember) he at once proposed, rather than that I should deceive you in a way so different from his own——”
“To do all we want of him?”
“To do all I did at least.”
“And it was then,” he took in, “that you wouldn’t deal?”
“Well”—try though she might to keep the colour out, it all came straighter and straighter now—“those moments had brought you home to me as they had also brought him; making such a difference, I felt, for what he veered round to agree to.”