"Everything that wasn't real you have shattered."
The rustic bench was reached and they paused there, though with no eyes for the shaft of mystic distance that opened before them. Jack's eyes were on her and he was conscious of a rising insistence in himself that matched and opposed her own.
"But you must be sorry for her pain," said Valerie, and now, with eyes almost stern in their demand, she gazed at him;—"you must be sorry that she has had to lose so much. And you would be glad, would you not, to think that real things, a new life, were to come to her?"
He understood; even before the words, his fear, his presage, leaped forward to this crashing together of all his hopes. And it seemed to him that a flame passed through him, shriveling in its ardent wrath all trite reticences and decorums.
"No; no, I should not be glad," he answered. His voice was violent; the eyes he fixed on her were violent. His words struck Imogen out of his life for ever.
"Why are you so cruel?" she faltered.
"I am cruel for you. I know what you want to do. You are going to give her your life."
Quick as a flash she answered—it was like a rapier parrying his stroke:—"Give?—what have I to do with it, if it comes to her?"
"Everything! Everything!" he cried.
"Nothing. You are mistaken."