His question flashed upon her faltering. “There is some one else?”
“I love some one else.”
Geoffrey did not speak, and a deep flush went over his face.
He had been prepared, she saw, for long and patient fighting; not for this abrupt defeat.
“What can I say?” she repeated. Tears sprang to her eyes. His suffering struck like a blow on her own suffering. Her own heart answered the inarticulate anguish that his must hold.
“Don’t let us say anything,” Geoffrey replied. “Let us walk on a little.”
The longing to comfort him struggled with the cruel necessity for further truth. To speak it now seemed brutal. She was thankful for the respite his silence gave her. They had not gone toward the pines, but down the long, bare slopes to a little wood where the sunlight flickered among young birches and the promise of green breathed through the white and gold.
“One gets one’s breath like this,” said Geoffrey. He had not looked at her while they walked. Now, as they paused in the heart of the woods, he bent his eyes upon her. She saw that he had got his breath only to pick up again a weapon. A hope, stern in its determination, hardly concealed itself.
“Don’t think me impertinent,” he said; “you understand that one must grasp at anything. This some one; you are engaged to him?”
The world, with the question, reeled suddenly to Felicia. She was alone. She must say that she was alone. But at the clear seeing of her despair—the seeing of it stripped to him—her self-control gave way.