“I accept all your faith,” she said. “Only you must help me to make my world, and not yours, with it. Don’t be afraid for Jane Amoret. I shall be firmly in her life. Rhoda shan’t keep me out. She won’t want to keep me out. Rhoda has far more chance of changing, of learning something from this experience, as a disconcerted and forgiven wife than as a sullen adventuress; and you—you will not be miserable; not with Rhoda, at all events; and you will be free. I am going to send a wire to Rhoda, at once, and tell her that I have reconsidered my advice to her. That, in itself, will show her how I managed her this morning. I shall tell her that she must go to London to-night, to her father. And to-morrow I’ll take Jane Amoret up and bring Rhoda and Niel together.”
He took it all in, wide-eyed, he too now measuring the threat.
“You can’t,” he said; “I won’t let you!”
“You’ll have to let me. I have the fact on my side as well as the faith. She wants to leave you. She wants only the excuse of being asked. You can’t stop my giving her the excuse.” Yes, after all, her fact against his faith, she must have her way. What could his love for Rhoda and his feeling for herself do against the ironic fact that Rhoda, simply, was tired of him? “You must see that you can’t force her to stay,” she said. “You couldn’t even prevent her coming to me this morning.”
She looked at him with all the force of her advantage and saw that before the cruel fact, and her determination, he knew his helplessness. It was, again, the bird arrested in its impulse; and a veil seemed to fall across his face, a shyness, almost a wildness to shut them out from each other. He dropped his eyes before her.
“Dear Mr. Darley, my dear young friend, see that it’s best. See that it’s best all round. See it with me,” she begged. “I was wrong this morning; wrong from the very first. Let it come to that only. Count yourself out. It was of myself, of my own delight in the child that I was thinking. No, not even thinking; I tried to think it was for her; but it was my own feeling that decided. If you had never come, it would still have been right to give her up—though I should never have seen it unless you’d come. It was almost a crime that I committed. They had asked me to implore her to go back; they trusted me. And I prevented the message coming to her. I did not believe the things I said to her—not as she thought I believed them. I did not care a rap about her dignity; you saw the falsity at once. I cared only about keeping Jane Amoret.”
He stood there before her, remote, unmoved, with downcast, unanswering eyes.
“Are you angry? Don’t you see it, too?” she pleaded.
“No.” He shook his head. “You had a right to keep the child.”
“Against all those other reasons? Against my own conscience?”