“Please come where I can see you,” she said at last.
He came at once, obediently, standing as he had stood a little while ago before the fire, his hands locked behind him, but now with face bent down, fixed in its effort to see clearly what had happened to them.
“You see, it was over. You see, you couldn’t have made anything of it.” It was almost with tears that she besought him not to suffer too much. “You have nothing to regret, except having believed in her. Tell me that you are not too unhappy.”
“I don’t know what I am,” Christopher said. “But I know I’ve more to regret than having believed in her. I’ve all the folly and mischief I’ve made.” He had thought it out and she could not deny what he had seen, not even when he went on, "If it could have been in our way,—yours and mine, or, at least, what was yours this morning, when you thought you had kept her with me,—everything might have been atoned for. It might have meant a certain kind of beauty, and a certain kind of happiness, even, perhaps. But in this way, the way she’s chosen, it only means just that—folly, mischief,"—he turned to the fire and looked down into it,—“sin,” he finished.
She could not deny it, even to give him comfort; but she could find something else. “It was Rhoda who chose. You, whatever your mistakes, chose very differently. I'm not trying to shift responsibility; to make mistakes is to be foolish and mischievous. But can’t even sin be atoned for? Doesn’t it all now depend on you? That you should make yourself worth it. You are the only one of us who can do that.”
He turned to her and his eyes studied her with an unaccepting gentleness.
“You mean because I’m a poet? It isn’t like you, really, to say that. You don’t believe in poets and their mission in that sense. It’s too facile.”
“Not only because you are a poet. I wasn’t thinking so much of that, although your gift helps. But simply because you are young and good.”
“I’m not good enough,” said Christopher. “And I’m too young. You’ve shown me that. I am afraid of myself. I see what one can do while meaning the best.”
She watched him with grave tenderness, feeling again, in his dispassionate capacity for accepted experience, his strange maturity. And knowing all that might be difficult, yet knowing that it would be, after all, to a decision like her own, the merest gossamers of convention that she must brave, she said,—and as she looked up at him his face seemed to blend with the face of her little, sleeping, lost Jane Amoret,—“Don’t you think I, perhaps, could be of help, while you are so young?”