She confessed all at his knees. Hardness and glitter had been the shield of the racked, terror-stricken heart. The girl was a woman and knew the use of shields.
“And Gavan, Gavan, worst of all,—far worst,—I don’t love him; I never loved him. It was simply—simply”—she could hardly speak—“that he frightened and flattered me. It was vanity—recklessness—I don’t know what it was.”
After the confession, she waited, her face hidden, for his reproach or anger. Neither came. Instead, she felt, in the long silence, that something quiet enveloped her.
She looked up to see his eyes far from her.
“Gavan, can you forgive me?” she whispered.
Once more he was looking at it all—all the cruel, the meaningless drama in which he had been enmeshed for a little while. Once more his thought had risen far above it, and the old peace, the old, dead peace, with no trembling of the hopes that meant only a deeper delusion, was regained. He knew how deep must be the reattained tranquillity, when, the woman he had loved at his feet, he felt no shrinking, no reproach, no desire, only an immense, an indifferent pity.
“Forgive you, Alice? Poor, poor Alice. Perhaps you should forgive me; but it isn’t a question of that. Don’t cry; don’t cry,” he repeated mechanically, gently stroking her hair—hair whose profuse, wonderful gold he had once kissed with a lover’s awed delight.
“You forgive me—you do forgive me, Gavan?”
“It isn’t a question of forgiveness; but of course I forgive you, dear Alice.”
“Gavan, tell me that you love me still. Can you love me? Oh, say that I haven’t lost that.”