"Oh—Milly!"—said poor Dick Quentyn. And the longing to comfort and console effacing his diffidence and the memory of her long unkindness towards himself, he knelt down beside her and took her into his arms.
Milly then said and did what she could never have believed herself capable of saying and doing. No pride could hold her from it, no dignity, not even common shame. She could not keep herself from dropping her face on his shoulder and sobbing;—"Oh—Dick—try—try to love me again. I am cold and selfish. I have behaved cruelly to everyone who loved me;—but I can't bear it any longer."
It was a startling moment for Dick Quentyn, the most startling of his life. "Try to love you?" he stammered. He pushed her back to look at her. "What do you mean, Milly?"
"What I say," Milly gasped.
"But what does it mean?" Dick repeated. "It isn't for you to ask me to love you. You know I love you. You know there's never been another woman in the world for me but you. It's you who have never loved me, Milly."
Her appeal had been like a diving under deep waters—she had not known when or where or how she would come up again. Now she opened her eyes and stared at her husband. She seemed, after that whirlpool moment of abysmal shame, to have come up from the further reaches of darkness, and it was under new, bewildering skies. Strange stars made her dizzy.
"Then why didn't you come and say good-bye to me—that day—in London this spring?" was all she found to say.
Dick was not stupid now. The lover's code was at last open between them, and he as well as she could read the significance of seemingly trivial words.
"Did you expect me?" he asked.
"Of course I expected you. I thought you saw how much," said Milly.