'You mean,' said Gerald, he was very pale, 'that I've won no rights; you don't want a man who has won no rights.'
'There are no rights to win, Gerald.'
'Because of what I've done to him?'
'Perhaps; but I don't think it's that.'
'Because of what I've done to you—not seeing—all our lives?'
'Perhaps, Gerald. I don't know. I can't tell you, for I don't know myself. I don't think anything has been killed. I think something is dead that's been dying by inches for years. Don't press me any more. Accept the truth. It's all over. I don't want you any longer.'
Helen had risen while she spoke and kept her eyes on Gerald's in speaking. Until this moment, for all his pain and perplexity, he had not lost hope. He had been amazed and helpless and full of fear, but he had not believed, not really believed, that she was lost to him. Now, she saw it in his eyes, he did believe; and as the patient, hearing his sentence, gazes dumb and stricken, facing death, so he gazed at her, seeing irrevocability in her unmoved face. And, accepting his doom, sheer childishness overcame him. As Franklin the day before had felt, so he now felt, the intolerableness of his woe; and, as with Franklin, the waves closed over his head. Helen was so near him that it was but a stumbling step that brought her within his arms; but it was not with the lover's supplication that he clung to her; he clung, hiding his face on her breast, like a child to its mother, broken-hearted, bewildered, reproachful. And, bursting into tears, he sobbed: 'How cruel you are! how cruel! It is your pride—you've the heart of a stone! If I'd loved you for years and told you and made you know you loved me back—could I have treated you like this—and cast you off—and stopped loving you, because you'd never seen before? O Helen, how can you—how can you!'
After a moment Helen spoke, angrily, because she was astounded, and because, for the first time in her life, she was frightened, beyond her depth, helpless in the waves of emotion that lifted her like great encompassing billows. 'Gerald, don't. Gerald, it is absurd of you. Gerald, don't cry.' She had never seen him cry.
He heard her dimly, and the words were the cruel ones he expected. The sense of her cruelty filled him, and the dividing sense that she, who was so cruel, was still his only refuge, his only consolation.
'What have I done, I'd like to know, that you should treat me like this? If you loved me before—all those years—why should you stop now, because I love you? why should you stop because of telling me?'