She closed the door softly, but she did not immediately turn round. The
palms of her hands were wet with the cold, frightened sweat of that
awful moment. When she returned, she came to him with a wondering,
timid, girlish look in her eyes.
"Oh, Jack, if you only could!" she said, and then only did she put out
her hands and let her fingers press over his heart.
The next moment she was swept up in his arms, shrinking and very still.
All at once he put her from him and said roughly:
"What was his name?"
"No, no!"
"Give me his name," he said miserably. "I must know it."
"No--neither now nor at any other time," she said firmly, and her look
as it met his had again all the old domination. "That is my condition."
"Ah, how weak I have been," he said to himself, with a last bitter,
instinctive revolt. "How weak I am."
She saw and understood.
"We must be generous," she said, changing her voice quickly to
gentleness. "He has been pained enough already. He alone will suffer.
And if you knew his name it would only make you unhappy."
He still rebelled, but suddenly to him came a thought which at first he
was ashamed to express.
"He doesn't know?"
She lied.
"No."
"He's still waiting--there?"
"Yes."
"Ah, he's waiting," he said to himself.
A gleam of vanity, of triumph over the discarded, humiliated one, leaped
up fiercely within him and ended all the lingering, bitter memories.
"Then you care?" she said, resting her head on his shoulder that he
might not see she had read such a thought.
"Care?" he cried. He had surrendered. Now it was necessary to be
convinced. "Why, when I received your letter I--I was wild. I wanted to
do murder."
"Jackie!"
"I was like a madman--everything was gone--nothing was left."
"Oh, Jack, how I have made you suffer!"
"Suffer? Yes, I have suffered!" Overcome by the returning pain of the
memory, he dropped into a chair, trying to control his voice. "Yes, I
have suffered!"
"Forgive me!" she said, slipping on her knees beside him, and burying
her head in his lap.
"I was out of my head--I don't know what I did, what I said. It was as
though a bomb had exploded. My life was wrecked, shattered--nothing
left."
He felt the grief again, even more acutely. He suffered for what he had
suffered.
"Jack, I never really could have _abandoned_ you," she cried bitterly.
She raised her eyes toward him and suddenly took notice of the
time-tables that lay clutched in his hands. "Oh, you were going away!"
He nodded, incapable of speech.
"You were running away?"
"I was running away--to forget--to bury myself!"
"Oh, Jack!"
"There was nothing here. It was all a blank! I was running away--to bury
myself!"
At the memory of that miserable hopeless moment, in which he had
resolved on flight, the tears, no longer to be denied, came dripping
down his cheeks.