"Your love, then, was a pretence to save me!"
"Nothing was pretence, at first," he answered her patiently. "At first I was only glad for your sake that I was going to be out of the way so soon; and when I found that you could care for me again I was glad that I had still a month to live with you."
His words smote on her heart like stones. He saw it and yearned over her pain; but such yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, he knew, the poison in her veins that maddened her.
She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He had not put it into words, but with the abandonment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it.
"It was, then, because it was only for a month."
He hesitated, seeing, too. "That I was glad?"
"That you loved me."
Across the room, in a long silence, they looked at each other. And in the silence another truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary.
"Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because it was only for a month?"
The shock went as visibly through her as though it had, indeed, been a stone hurled at her breast. "You mean—you mean—" she stammered—"Oh—you don't believe that I love you—You believe that it could pass, with me, as it has with you!" She threw herself into the chair, casting her arms on the back, burying her face in them.