Nino answered, with boyish logic. "Anyway, she ought not to hurt me. I
don't like to be hurt."

The foolish, childish words came back to Herman's mind a couple of
hours later, as he waited in the boarding-house parlor for Helen
Greyson. He smiled with bitterness to think how perfectly they
represented his own state of mind. He said to himself that he was tired
of being hurt, and rose at the moment to take in both his hands the
hands of a beautiful woman, to his eyes no older and no less fair than
when he had said good-by to her on his wedding morning, six years
before. He tried to speak, but tears came instead of words; choked and
blinded, he turned away abruptly, struggling to regain his composure.

The meeting after long years of those who have loved and been
separated, may, for the moment, carry them back to the time of their
parting so completely that all that lies between seems annihilated. The
old emotion reasserts itself so strongly, the past lives again so
vividly, that there seems to have been no break in feeling, and they
stand in relation to one another as if the parting were yet to come.
When they had been together a little, the time which lay between them
would once more become a reality; but at the first touch of their hands
those bitter days of loneliness ceased to exist, and they seemed to
stand together again, as when they were saying good-by six years
before.

With her old time self-control, it was Helen who spoke first, and her
words recalled him from the past and its passion, to the present and
its duty.

"Tell me how Ninitta is," she said, "and the boy. I do so want to see