She sobbed on: 'Even in the first week, I knew that something was wrong. Of course I was in love—but it was only that—there was nothing else except being in love. Doubts gnawed at me from the first; I couldn't bear to accept them; I hoped on and on. Only in this last week I've seen that I can't—I can't marry him. Oh——' and the wail was again repeated, 'what shall I do, Franklin?'
He spoke at last, and in the disarray of her sobbing and darkened condition—her face pressed against him, her ears full of the sound of her own labouring breath—she could not know to the full how strange his voice was, though she felt strangeness and caught her breath to listen.
'Don't take it like this, Althea,' he said. 'It's not so bad as all this. It can all be made right. You must just tell him the truth and set him free.'
And now there was a strange silence. He was waiting, and she was waiting too; she stilled her breath and he stilled his; all each heard was the beating of his and her own heart. And the silence, to Althea, was full of a new and formless fear, and to Franklin of an acceptation sad beyond all the sadnesses of his life. Even before Althea spoke, and while the sweet, the rapturous, the impossible hope softly died away, he knew in his heart, emptied of magic, that it was he Althea needed.
She spoke at last, in a changed and trembling voice; it pierced him, for he felt the new fear in it: 'How can I tell him the truth, Franklin?' she said. 'How can I tell you the truth? How can I say that I turned from the real thing, the deepest, most beautiful thing in my life—and hurt it, broke it, put it aside, so blind, so terribly blind I was—and took the unreal thing? How can I ever forgive myself—but, O Franklin, much, much more, how can you ever forgive me?' her voice wailed up, claiming him supremely.
She believed it to be the truth, and he saw that she believed it. He saw, sadly, clearly, that among all the twistings and deviations of her predicament, one thing held firm for her, so firm that it had given her this new faith in herself—her faith in his supreme devotion. And he saw that he owed it to her. He had given it to her, he had made it her possession, to trust to as she trusted to the ground under her feet, ever since they were boy and girl together. Six months ago it would have been with joy, and with joy only, that he would have received her, and have received the gift of her bruised, uncertain heart. Six months—why only a week ago he would have thought that it could only be with joy.
So now he found his voice and he knew that it was nearly his old voice for her, and he said, in answer to that despairing statement that wailed for contradiction: 'Oh no, Althea, dear. Oh no, you haven't wrecked our lives.'
'But you are bound now,' she hardly audibly faltered. 'You have another life opening before you. You can't come back now.'
'No, Althea,' Franklin repeated, and he stroked her shoulder again. 'I can come back, if you want me. And you do want me, don't you, dear? You will let me try to make you happy?'
She put back her head to look at him, her poor face, tear-stained, her eyes wild with their suffering, and he saw the new fear in them, the formless fear. 'O Franklin,' she said, and the question was indeed a strange one to be asked by her of him: 'do you love me?'