“I am already in the dust,” said Hilda, after a pause.
“You shall not sink to a morbid acceptance of that venom!” cried Odd; he took her by the shoulders with almost a suggestion of shaking her. “Sit up. Listen to me,” he said, raising her and looking down at her stricken face, his hands on her shoulders. “I have loved you passionately for months. She was right in one thing; I had better have told her, not have fumbled with that fatally misplaced idea of honor. You may have loved me, but I was as unconscious of it as you were. To-day you were worn out, terrified, miserable. Just see it with one grain of common charity, of common sense, psychology, physiology if you will, for you are ill, wretchedly weak and off balance, my darling child!” Odd added, sitting down beside her; and he would have drawn her to him, but Hilda repeated—
“Don’t.”
“You felt my pity, my sympathy,” Odd went on, holding her hands. “You felt my love, poor little one, unconsciously. You turned to me like the child you were and are. You were starving for kindness, consolation—for love—you came to your friend, the friend you trusted, and you found more than a friend. The love you owned so beautifully was a truth too high for the hearer.”
“Oh! I did not dream that you loved me. I did not dream that I loved you!” Hilda wailed suddenly.
“Thank God that you own to that!” Odd ejaculated.
“That does not clear me,” she retorted. “No, no; I was a fool. You, the man engaged to my sister! I should have felt the danger, the disloyalty of your interest. I was a fool not to feel it! And that appeal I made to you—it was no more or less that sickening self-pity, that dastardly whine over my own pathos, that morbid sentimentality! I see it all, all! I was trying to make you care for me, love me. I suppose crimes are usually committed by people off balance physically, but crimes are crimes, and I am wicked. I hate myself!” she sobbed, bending again her face upon her hands.
“Hilda,” said Odd, trying to speak calmly and reasonably, “you could not have tried to make me fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for months that I adored you. You complain! You gain pity! When your cold little air of impersonality blinded even my eyes; when only my love for you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, step by step—you retreating before me—to the final realizations; and final they are not, I could swear to it! Ah! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get at the real truth. I shall worm it from you. You shall be forced to tell me all that you have suffered.” Hilda interrupted him with an “Oh!” from between clenched teeth.
“Katherine was right,” she said, “I have painted myself in pathetic colors. What a prig! What an egotist!” Her voice trembled on its low note of passionate self-scorn.
“An egotist!” Odd burst into a loud laugh. “That caps the climax. Come, Hilda,” he added, “don’t be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, still facts; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice among them. As I say, I haven’t yet sounded the depths of your self-renunciation, and, as I say, some day you will tell me, my Hilda; my brave, splendid, unconscious little child.” Odd put his arms around her as he spoke, but Hilda’s swift uprising from them had a lightning-like decision.