pitiably moving—“I didn’t mean to lead you on,” she said naïvely. “I shouldn’t have let you get started.”
“Oh, Ann,” he said, “you didn’t do anything! It wasn’t your fault! You couldn’t help it—I was the one who started it.”
“No, no,” she muttered, with a kind of sullen, miserable doggedness. “It was all my fault…. Could have stopped it.” She turned abruptly, miserably, and began to stride on again.
“But, Ann,” he began, with a kind of desperate persuasiveness, as he caught up with her, “don’t take it this way…. Don’t worry about it like this!… We didn’t do anything bad, honestly we didn’t!”
“Oh,” she muttered without turning her head, “it was an awful thing—an awful thing to do to you!… I’m so ashamed,” she muttered. “It was a rotten thing to do!”
“But you did nothing!” he protested. “I’m the one!”
“No, no,” she muttered again—“I started it… I don’t know why…. But I had no right… there’s something you don’t understand.”
“But what? What is it, Ann?” He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over this dumb, spinsterly integrity of New England conscience which, it seemed to him, was taking the episode so bitterly to heart.
She paused in her long stride below another street lamp, and turning, spoke sternly, desperately, to him.
“Listen!” she said. “You’ve got to forget everything that happened tonight…. I never knew you felt that way about me…. You’ve got to forget about me…. You must never think of me that way again!”
“Why?” he said.
“Because,” she muttered, “it’s wrong… wrong.”
“Why is it wrong?”
She did not answer for a moment, and then, turning, looked him straight in the eye:
“Because,” she said, with quiet bluntness, “nothing can come of it…. I don’t feel that way about you.”
He could not answer for a moment, and it seemed to him that a thin film of ice had suddenly hardened round his heart.
“Oh,” he said presently; and, after a moment, added, “and don’t you think you ever could?”
She did not answer, but began to walk rapidly ahead. He caught up with her again, took her by the arm and pulled her round to face him. He said sharply:
