"Yes; perhaps that is your crime, if you want to put it so," said Milly. "I don't blame you, you know. You could not help it. But your love has always been a prison. As long as I was contented in the prison you made it a very charming place to live in. But when I wanted to be free, to have other, deeper, realler loves, I knew that I had a gaoler to get past, a gaoler who would not kill me, but whom I would have to kill. So that I sat in my cell and did not dare turn the key in the lock for fear of what would happen to you. And it isn't true to say that you left the door open. You pretended to, of course. But when I did make my one effort, when I did try to creep out under your eyes, you turned the key on me quickly enough. The walk this morning. You knew that I hoped for it alone. You knew that it was our last chance."
While Milly spoke these words to her, Christina sat with her head bent down and her hands pressed tightly together in her lap, and it seemed to her that she was weeping inwardly, tears of blood. It was shame, unutterable shame, that she felt, mixed with the anguish, and weighing her down to the earth. Shame for what she had done in sacrifice to the love she heard thus abused; shame for the truth, the cruel half-truth, in Milly's words; and shame for Milly that she could find it in her to speak such words to her. Deeper? Realler? Could any love, though tricked out in romantic conventions, be deeper or realler than the love she had for Milly? In the innermost chambers of her heart she knew that, in spite of the cruel half-truth, what Milly said was not the whole. She would—oh yes, she would have given her up—with gladness—as a mother gives up her child—to a love that she could have recognized as ennobling. It had not been her own selfish clinging, only, that had nerved her. It had been the thought of Milly's truest good. And if she were to say this to Milly, she knew now what withering laughter she would hear.
The thought of this laughter from Milly's lips, of Milly's cruelty to her, hunted her down the first turning of concealment open to her. "I didn't want to come with you," she said. "You made me come. But I was glad—for your sake—because it shielded you. You had made it so obvious to him that you wanted it to be alone. I thought that you had made it too obvious."
Milly drew a long breath and a vivid red mounted to her cheeks. For some moments she sat still, saying nothing. Then, not meeting her friend's eyes, for they were now fixed on her, she rose.
"Yes. I have been unfair," said Milly. "I have been ungrateful and unkind, and unfair. I know that you have thought only of me; and you saw what I've only realised in this last hour. It has hurt so terribly to realise it—to realise that I've had my chance of happiness and thrown it away and that now it's too late to get it back again—it's hurt so terribly that it has made me cruel. You have been right all along and I have been a fool. But there it is. I love him and I'm broken-hearted, and now all that I can do is to go away and hide myself."
She was going, actually going. Their life together was over, shattered. The intolerable realisation crashed down upon Christina's abasement. She stood up, staring at her friend. "You are going to leave me, Milly?" she asked.
Milly averted her eyes. "Yes, Christina. I want to be alone."
"But you will come back?"
"I don't know," said Milly. Still she averted her eyes; but, in the rigid silence that followed, compunction evidently wrought upon her. She glanced round at her suffering friend and Christina's eyes met hers. They hurt her. They were glazed, like the eyes of a deer, waiting for the hunter's final blow.
"Christina," she said, and her voice showed her pity; "won't you try to learn to live without me? Really—really—it can't come back again, as it was. You must see that. Not after all that we have said, all that has happened. Learn to live without me. Get some nice woman and go to Greece and try to forget me. I can only mean suffering for you now, and I'm not nearly good enough for you."