Christina was remembering that Milly had only expressed indifference as to Dick's danger.
The ensuing evening was, to Christina, uncanny in its unapparent strangeness. She and Dick were both aware of novelty and Milly was aware of none. Her cheerful kindness was as natural and spontaneous as though she had been a girl greeting a long absent brother. She questioned Dick, and, as her questions showed interest—interest and a knowledge horribly surprising to Christina—Dick talked with unusual fluency. Christina looked at them and listened to them, while Milly, leaning an arm on the table, gazed with gravely shining eyes at her husband. The arm, the eyes, the lines of the throat, were very lovely. Christina's mind fixed upon that beauty, and she wished that Milly would not lean so and look so. Milly, again, was unaware. It was Christina who was aware; Christina who was quivering with latent, unformulated consciousness. After dinner, Milly and Dick still talked; she still listened. She knew nothing about Africa.
For three or four days this was the situation; a reunited brother and sister; a friend, for the time being, necessarily incidental. Then, suddenly, the presages grew plainly ominous. Was it her own realization of loneliness, of not being needed, that so overwhelmed her? or the sense of some utter change in her darling—a change so gradual that until its accomplishment it had seemed madness to recognize it? The moment of recognition came one day, when, on going into the library, she found Dick and Milly sitting side by side at the table, their heads bent over a map; and they were not looking at the map; they were looking at each other; still like brother and sister, but such fond brother and sister, while they smiled and talked.
Milly turned her head and saw Christina, and Christina knew that some evident adjustment went over her own face, for Milly jumped up, eagerly, too eagerly, and pulled a chair back for her and said; "Sit down, dearest. Dick is telling me adventures."
What was it that drove into Christina's heart like a knife? Milly smiled at her, eagerly smiled; and yet she was miles and miles away; had she been in the jungles of Africa with her husband she could not have been further; and she was greeting her as though she were a guest, greeting her with conventional warmth and courteous sweetness. Christina was not wanted; through the warmth and sweetness she felt that.
Smiling, she said she had come for a book. Going to the book-cases she sought for one accurately—why she should seek, as though she had come in with the intention of finding it, a volume of frothy eighteenth century French memoirs she could not have told—and, smiling again upon them with unconstrained lightness, she left them. She walked steadily to her room, locked the door, and, falling upon her knees beside the bed, broke into an agony of tears.
The end had come; not of Christina's love, not of her need, but of Milly's. At first her mind refused to face the full realization—groped among the omens of the past, would not see in Dick, even now, the cause of all. She could trace the gradual, the dreadful severance; Milly's slow loss of interest in her and in their life together. It was at first only for the fact of loss that she wept, that loss, only, she could look at. But by degrees, as her stifled sobs grew quieter, she was able to think, to think clearly, fiercely, with desperate snatchings at hope, while she crouched by the bed; pushing back her hair from her forehead; pressing her hot temples with icy hands.
Why should Milly lose interest? How could she? How could love and truest sympathy, truest understanding—how could they fail?
"Love begets love. Love begets love," she whispered under her breath, not knowing that she spoke, and, in this hour of shipwreck, clinging unconsciously to such spars and fragments of childish, unreasoning trust as her memory tossed her. No other friendship threatened hers; she was first as friend, irrevocably, she knew it. First as friend did not mean to Milly, could never mean, the deep-dwelling devotion that it meant to her; but such affinity and attachment as Milly felt could not die without some other cause than mere weariness. And the truth no longer to be evaded broke over her. It was the simplest while the most absurd of truths. Milly was falling in love; Milly was falling in love with Dick; and she was frank and happy because she did not know it; and he did not know it. Like two children with a fresh day of play and sunshine before them, they were engaged in merry, trivial games, picnics, make-believes, no thought of sentiment or emotion in them to account for the new sympathy; but from these games they would return hand in hand, all in all to each other, bound together in the lover's illusion and needing no one else. Maps! Travels! Africa! Did they not see these things as silly toys, as she did? What could Milly care for such toys? That she should play with them, as if she placed tin soldiers and blew a tin trumpet, showed the fatal glamour that was upon her; glamour only, a moonshine mood of vague restlessness and craving. How dignify by the sacred name of love this sentiment, all made of her weakness, her emotionalism, her egotism, that swayed her now so ludicrously towards the man whom, open-eyed, she had rejected and scorned for years?