"I am quite sure of my own verdict. I take all the responsibility. I think other people wrong. And you must think me wrong, if it looks to you like that."
"But, it's almost impossible for me to think you wrong," said Sir Basil, feeling that a chill far frostier than the seeming situation warranted had crept upon them. "Even if you are—why we all are, of course, most of the time, I suppose. It's only—it's only that I can't see clear. That you should be so sure of an opinion, a mere opinion, when it hurts someone else, so abominably;—it's there I don't seem to see you, you know."
"Can't you trust me?" Valerie asked. It was her last chance, her last throw of the dice. She knew that her heart was suffocating her, with its heavy throbbing, but to Sir Basil's ear her voice was still the deadened, the unchanged voice. "Can't you believe in my sincerity when I give you my reasons? Can't you, knowing me as you do, for so long, believe that I am more likely to be right, in my judgment of my husband, than—other people?"
Her eyes, dark and deep in the moonlight, were steadily upon him. And now, probed to the depths, he, too, was conscious of a parting of the ways It was a choice of loyalties, and he remembered those other eyes, sunlit, limpid, uplifted, that lifted him, too, with their heavenly, upward gaze. He stammered; he grew very red; but he, too, was faithful to his own light.
"Of course I know, my dear friend, that you are sincere. But, as to your being right;—in these things, one can't help seeing crookedly, sometimes, when personal dislike has entered into a,—a near relationship. One really can hardly help it, can one?—" he almost pleaded.
Valerie's eyes rested deeply and darkly upon him and, as they rested, he felt, strangely and irresistibly, that they let him go. Let him go to sink or to soar—that depended on which vision were the truer.
He knew that after his flush he had become very pale. His cigar had gone out;—he looked at it with a nervous gesture. The moonlight was cold and Valerie had turned away her eyes. But as she suddenly rose, he saw, glancing from his dismal survey of the dead cigar, that she was smiling again. It was a smile that healed even while it made things hazy to him. Nothing was hazy to her, he was very sure of that; but she would make everything as easy as possible to him—even the pain of finding her so wrong, even the pain of seeing that she didn't care enough, the complex pain of being set free to seize the new happiness—he was surer of that than ever.
He, too, got up, grateful, troubled, but warm once more.
The moonlight was bright and golden, and the shadows of the vines that stirred against the sky wavered all over her as she stood before him. So strangely did the light and shade move upon her, that it seemed as if she glided through the ripples of some liquid, mysterious element, not air nor light nor water, but a magical mingling of the three. He had just time to feel, vaguely, for everything was blurred, this sense of strangeness and of sweetness, too, when she gave him her hand.
"Friends, as ever, all the same—are we not?" she said.