Yet Odd felt that there might be some ignoble self-interest in showing the ugly fact with no softening circumstances; circumstances might indeed soften the ugliness into a dangerously tragic resemblance to despairing disappointment. Hilda would be horribly apt to think more of the circumstances than of the fact. Odd was consciously inclined to think the fact simply ugly, inclined to believe that the irksomeness of his growing disapproval, rather than the loss of his love, had led Katherine to seek a more amenable substitute; but with a sense of honor so acute as to be hardly honest, Peter put aside his own advantageous surmises, and prepared to give Katherine’s story from a most delicate and selected standpoint. Strict adherence to Katherine’s words, and yet such artistic chivalry in their setting that even Katherine would find her sacrifice at Hilda’s altar painless.
“You shall have her own words,” he said, after a long pause. He felt that the inner trembling had grown to a great terror. He became pale before the compelling necessity for exaggerated magnanimity.
To lose his own cause in pleading Katherine’s loomed a black probability, yet in his very defeat he would prove himself not unworthy of Hilda’s love; neither cruel nor mean nor weak. Ah! piercing words! At least he could now draw them from their rankling. And as they walked together he told Katherine’s story, lending to it every charitable possibility with which she herself could not honestly have invested it.
When he had done, taking off his hat, for his temples were throbbing with the stress of the recital, and looking at Hilda with an almost pitifully boyish look, he had emphasized his own unconscious revelation of his love for Hilda, emphasized that hint of broken-hearted generosity in Katherine, he had hardly touched on her lie to Allan or on the glaring fact that she had made sure of him before giving Peter his freedom. The soreness that the revelation of Katherine’s selfishness had made between them so soon after their engagement, he had not mentioned.
Hilda walked along, looking steadily down. Once or twice during the story she had clutched her clasped hands more tightly, and once or twice her step had faltered and she had paused as though to listen more intently, but the white profile with its framing eddies of hair crossed the pale gold background, its attitude of intense quiet unchanged.
The silence that followed his last words seemed cruelly long to Odd, but at last she lifted her eyes, and meeting the solemn, pitiful, boyish look, her own look broke suddenly into passionate sympathy and emotion.
“Peter,” she said, standing still before him, “she didn’t love you.”
“I don’t think she did.” Odd’s voice was shaken but non-committal.
“Perhaps she loved you more than she could love any one else,” said Hilda.
“Yes; perhaps.”