'You do not understand, Gerald. I am disappointed—in both my friends. It is an ugly thing that has happened. You feel it so; and so do I.'
He turned and began to walk on again. And still it lay with her to speak the words that would make truth manifest. She could not utter them; she could not, now, think. All that she knew was the dense, suffocating fear.
Suddenly she stopped, put her hands on her heart, then covered her eyes. 'I am ill; I feel very ill,' she said. It was true. She did feel very ill. She went to the bank at the side of the road and sank down on it. Gerald had supported her; she had dimly been aware of the bitter joy of feeling his arm around her, and the joy of it slid away like a snake, leaving poison behind. He stood above her, alarmed and pitying.
'Althea—shall I go and get some one? I am so awfully sorry—so frightfully sorry,' he repeated.
She shook her head, sitting there, her face in her hands and her elbows on her knees. And in her great weakness an unbelievable thing happened to her. She began to cry piteously, and she sobbed: 'O Gerald—don't be unkind to me! don't be cruel! don't hurt me! O Gerald—love me—please love me!' The barriers of her pride, of her thought, were down, and, like the flowing of blood from an open wound, the truth gushed forth.
For a moment Gerald was absolutely silent. It was a tense, a stricken silence, and she felt in it something of the horror that the showing of a fatal wound might give. Then he knelt beside her; he took her hand; he put his arm around her. 'Althea, what a brute—what a brute I've been. Forgive me.' It was for something else than his harsh words that he was asking her forgiveness. He passed hurriedly from that further, that inevitable hurt. 'I can't tell you how—— I mean I'm so completely sorry. You see, I was so taken aback—so cut up, you know. I could think of nothing else. She is such an old friend—my nearest friend. I never imagined her marrying, somehow; it was like hearing that she was going away for ever. And what you said made me angry.' Even he, with all his compunction, could but come back to the truth.
And, helpless, she could but lean on his pity, his sheer human pity.
'I know. He was my nearest friend too. For all my life I've been first with him. I was cut up too. I am sorry—I spoke so.'
'Poor girl—poor dear. Here, take my arm. Here. Now, you do feel better.'
She was on her feet, her hand drawn through his arm, her face turned from him and still bathed in tears.