Oldmeadow was silent for a moment and Barney, on the arm of the sofa, was silent. “Of course,” Oldmeadow then said, “the less you say about it the better. Things will take their place gradually.”
“I’ve not said anything about it,” said Barney. “I’ve only thought of comforting and cherishing her. But it’s not enough. I’ll never say anything; but she’ll know I’m keeping something back. She knows it already. I see that now. And I didn’t know it till you put it to me.”
“She’ll have to accept it; or to live with it unaccepted, then. You can’t consider yourself a criminal to give her moral ease.”
“No,” said Barney after a pause. “No; I can’t do that. Though that’s what Mummy wants me to do. But I can be horribly sorry.”
“Horribly sorry. Let the rest sink into the unspoken. When people love each other they can, I’m sure, live over any amount of unspoken things.”
“It hasn’t been unspoken between you and me, though, has it, Roger?” said Barney, and he raised himself and got upon his feet as he said it. “There’s the trouble. There’s where I am wrong. For she’d feel it an intolerable wrong if she knew that it hadn’t been unspoken between you and me. And she’d be right. When people love each other such reticences and exclusions wrong their love.”
“But since you say she knows,” Oldmeadow suggested after another moment.
Barney stood staring out of the twilight window.
“She doesn’t know that I tell you,” he said.
“You’ve told me nothing,” said Oldmeadow.