"What do you mean, Milly?" he said. "Kept me from coming? But she loved you, Milly? She'd given her life to you. You can't mean what you are saying."
"Yes," Milly kept her grasp of his shoulder. "It is true. She loved me, but it was a madness of jealousy. Her love was a prison. I told her so. We spoke of it all on that day, when she came back from seeing you and did not tell me that she had seen you. I told her that her love was a prison and that she had kept you from me, and that I was going to leave her. And even then she did not tell me. We parted and I did not see her again until the day she died. She sent for me to come to her. Yes—" her eyes, deep with joy and horror, were on him.—"That is what she was going to confess to me; and died without confessing. She kept us apart because she knew that we loved each other and she could not bear to give me up."
They stood in the firelight and he took her hands and they looked at each other as though, after long wanderings, they had found each other at last. There would yet be much to tell and to explain, but Dick saw now what had happened. Only after many moments of grave mutual survey, did he say, gently, with a sudden acute wonder and pity—"Poor thing."
"Horrible, oh horrible!" said Milly, leaning her head on his shoulder. "You might have died away from me—never knowing.—I might never have seen you again.—Horrible woman!—Horrible love."
"Poor thing," Dick repeated gently. He kissed his wife's forehead and, his arm around her;—"I haven't died.—She is dead. I do see you again.—She doesn't see you. I have got you.—She has lost you."
Milly still shuddered; she still looked down the black precipice, only just escaped. "Yes, she has lost me for ever. I wish I did not feel that I hate her; but I do. It may be cruel, it is cruel. But all that I can feel for her now is hatred."
"Ah—but she loved you tremendously. And she's dead," said Dick. "All that I can feel is that."
But Milly only said: "I love you all the more for feeling it."