Your long years of suffering have hardened into injustice and wrong." Suddenly he touched her arm.

"There are women as young as you were when I wronged you, who would be my wife now--young, beautiful, buoyant; but I come to you because I feel we might still have some years of happiness.

Together, where our boy's fate mattered, we two could help him on his way.

That is what I feel, my dear." When he touched her arm she did not move, yet there was in his fingers something which stirred ulcers long since healed and scarred.

She stepped back from him.
"Do not touch me.