“I am sorry,” Gavan repeated. “I see, of course. Of course it was noble.”
“You should be more than sorry. You knew that I did not love him.”
“I am more than sorry. I am ashamed,” he answered gravely.
He had the dignity of full contrition; but under it, unshaken after all, was the repudiation of the nearness that her explanation revealed. His heart throbbed heavily, for he saw, as never before, how near it was; yet he had never feared her less. He had learned too much that afternoon to fear her. He was sure of his power to save her from what he had so fully learned.
He looked away from her and for long out at the ebbing red, and it was the unshaken resolve that spoke at last. “But all the same I am sorry that it was only that. He would have made you happy.”
“You knew that I did not love him,” Eppie repeated.
“With time, as his wife, you might love him.” Facing her, now, folding his arms, he leaned back against the mantel at his far end of the room. “I know that I’ve seemed odiously to belittle and misunderstand you, and I am ashamed, Eppie—more ashamed than you can guess; but, in another way, it wasn’t so belittling, either. I thought you very wise and courageous. I thought that you had determined to take the real thing that life offered you and to turn your back, for once and for all, on—on unreal things.” He stopped at that, as though to let it have its full drop, and Eppie, her eyes still fixed on him from her distant chair, made no answer and no sign of dissent.
As he spoke a queer, effervescent blitheness had come to him, a light indifference to his own cruelty; and the hateful callousness of his state gave him a pause of wonder and interest. However, he couldn’t help it; it was the reaction, no doubt, from the deep disgust of his abasement, and it helped him, as nothing else would have done, thoroughly to accomplish his task.
“He can give you all the things you need,” he went on, echoing poor Grainger’s naïf summing up of his own advantages. “He has any amount of money, and a very big future before him; and then, really above all, you do care for him so much. You see the same things in life. You believe in the same things; want the same things. If you would take him he would never fail you in anything.”
Still her heavy silence was unbroken. He waited in vain for a sign from her, and in the silence the vibration of her dumb agony seemed to reach him, so that, with all the callousness, he had to conquer an impulse to go to her and see if she wept. But when he said, “I wish you would take him, Eppie,” and she at last answered him, there were no tears in her voice.