Hilda’s hands were still clasped behind her, and she looked hard into his face as she added with a certain stern deliberateness—
“I don’t believe she ever loved anybody.”
Odd was silent. He had not dared to hope for such a clear perception.
“She was very cruel to me,” said Hilda, after a little pause, and her eyes, turning from his, looked far away as if following the fading of a lost illusion.
“I don’t think she ever cared much for me either,” she added.
“Not much; not as you interpret caring.”
Peter kept the balance with difficulty, for over him rushed that indignant realization of Katherine’s intrinsic selfishness.
“No; I could not have been so cruel to her, not even if she had robbed me of you.” It was the most self-assertive speech he had ever heard her utter.
“No; you could not have been so cruel to her,” he repeated, “not even loving me as you did and as she did not.”
There was a pause, a pause in which it seemed to Odd that the very trees stretched out their branches in breathless listening, and Hilda said slowly—