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Rh cared for me; after you'd told me how much my faith meant to you—you think that, after all that, I deliberately abandoned you because I suddenly realized you had been the Lone Wolf—!"

"I'm sorry if I hurt you. But what can I think?"

"But you are wrong!" she protested vehemently—"quite, quite wrong! I ran away from myself—not from you—and with another motive, too, that I can't explain."

"You ran away from yourself—not from me?" he repeated, puzzled.

"Don't you understand? Why make it so hard for me? Why make me say outright what pains me so?"

"Oh, I beg of you—"

"But if you won't understand otherwise—I must tell you, I suppose." She checked, breathless, flushed, trembling. "You recall our talk after dinner, that night—how I asked what if you found out you'd been mistaken in me, that I had deceived you; and how I told you it would be impossible for me ever to marry you?"

"I remember."

"It was because of that," she said—"I ran away; because I hadn't been talking idly; because you were mistaken in me, because I was deceiving you, because I could never marry you, and because—suddenly—I came to know that, if I didn't go then and there, I might never find the strength to leave you, and only suffering and unhappiness could come of it all. I had to go, as much for your sake as for my own."

"You mean me to understand, you found you were beginning to—to care a little for me?"