"I want to think over what you have said. Please don't think me ungracious or unkind, Sydney. I want to do what is best. We can talk about it another time, can we not?"
"Any time you like."
And then he left her, and she lay still.
Had she been wrong all the while? Had she of her own free will allowed herself to drift into this state of languor, and weakness, and indifference to everything? What did these doctors know—what did Sydney himself know—of the great wave of disgust and shame and scorn that had passed over her soul and submerged all that was good and fair? They could not understand: she said to herself passionately that no man could understand the recoil of a woman's heart against sensual passion and impurity. In her eyes Sydney had fallen as much as the woman whom he had betrayed, although she knew that the world would not say so; and in his degradation she felt herself included. She was dragged down to his level—she was dragged through the mire: that was the thought that scorched her from time to time like a darting flame of fire. For Nan was very proud, although she looked so gentle, and she had never before come into contact with anything that could stain her whiteness of soul.
She had told Sydney that she loved him no longer, and in the deadness of emotion which had followed on the first acuteness of her grief for her lost idol, and the physical exhaustion caused by her late illness, she had thought she spoke the truth. But, after all, what was this yearning over him, in spite of all his errors, but love? what this continual thought of him, this aching sense of loss, even this intense desire that he should suffer for his sin, but an awakening within her of the deep, blind love that, as a woman has said, sometimes
"Stirreth deep below"
the ordinary love of common life, with a
"Hidden beating slow,
And the blind yearning, and the long-drawn breath
Of the love that conquers death"?
For the first time she was conscious of the existence of love that was beyond the region of spoken words, or caresses, or the presence of the beloved: love that intertwined itself with the fibres of her whole being, so that if it were smitten her very life was smitten too. This was the explanation of her weariness, her weakness, her distaste for everything: the best part of herself was gone when her love seemed to be destroyed. The invisible cords of love which bind a mother to her child are explicable on natural grounds; but not less strong, not less natural, though less common, are those which hold a nature like Nan's to the soul of the man she loves. That Sydney was unworthy of such a love, need not be said; but it is the office of the higher nature to seek out the unworthy and "to make the low nature better by its throes."
Nan lay still and looked her love in the face, and was startled to find that it was by no means dead, but stronger than it had been before. "And he is my husband," she said to herself; "I am bound to be true to him. I am ashamed to have faltered. What does it matter if he has erred? I may be bitterly sorry, but I will not love him one whit the less. I could never leave him now."