"Well, why don't you speak?"
She turned towards him. Gordon was still standing at the table by the lamp. For, now that his object was attained and she was alone with him, he found no words to express the questions he had meant to ask. The light fell full upon the delicate beauty of her face, and indeed nearly drove the questions themselves from his mind. "You always look to me as if you had just come out of a convent," he had once said to her; and that sentence most exactly indicated the nature of the passion he had felt for her--an intense love refined and exalted by a blind, unreasoning reverence. There was, in truth, a certain air of spirituality about her manifest to most people on their first introduction. But it belonged to the face, not to the expression. It was due to the fragile purity of her features, not to the mind which animated them, and was consequently more noticeable when she was in repose. The impression, as a rule, wore off upon a closer acquaintance, but Gordon had fallen in love and saw her always through the mist of his feelings.
So the memory of all that she had meant to him kept him silent now. His thoughts seemed almost a sacrilege--plainly impossible to speak unless Kate gave him a decided lead. He waited and watched her. The skin of her wrist had broken when Hawke gripped it, and every now and then a drop of blood would fall on to her white dress and trickle down in a red wavering line. The sight somehow fascinated Gordon, and as each drop fell he waited and watched for the next.
To Kate, his silence became intolerable. She would have preferred reproaches, abuse, even violence--anything, in a word--to this leaden reticence. For it accused her more sharply than any words. Her lover had always been as an easy book to her keen intelligence, and she could read clearly enough that what kept his lips locked now was the conflict between his new knowledge and his old loyalty. In a flash she imagined Hawke's behaviour under the like circumstances and contrasted it with Gordon's bearing. Side by side the two men toed the line for her mental inspection, and the result was a feminine outcry against Fate, the Powers above and below--what you will, in a word, except her concrete self.
"What brought you over here?" she cried. "You said you were going to Ravenglass. You told me so. What brought you over to Wastdale?"
She spoke fiercely, almost vindictively, and it seemed as if the pair had suddenly changed places, as if she were the accuser and he the culprit, standing meekly self-condemned. Indeed, to complete the illusion, there was even a tinge of remorse in his tone as he answered her.
"God, perhaps. Who knows?"
"Oh! yes, yes, yes!" she went on. "Preach to me! Preach to me! Go on! Only be quick about it and make the sermon short!"
"Don't, Kitty!" he said, and added, wistfully, "It can't be your true self that is speaking."
"Yea, it is," she replied, struggling with a sense of pity for him (evoked by the quiet sadness of his voice). "My very own self, my real true self, that you have never known--that you never would know. You always had wrong ideas about me. I tried to open your eyes at first, but it was no good, and I gave it up. You always dressed me up in virtues that didn't fit me. I used to feel as if I were wearing a strait-waistcoat."