“You can’t do anything clearly. You’re always in a mist. You want to know yourself; I grant you your honesty; but your feeling makes a mist around you. Listen to me. Let me show it to you. You love him still, of course. I shouldn’t care for you if you didn’t. You’ll go on loving him. And it will hurt sometimes. It will hurt me, too. People are made up of these irreconcilable knots. It can’t be helped. We’re here in life together, and we belong to each other, and there’s nothing between us but a memory. Perhaps you could go on holding out against me; but you can’t go on holding out against yourself. You want to be mine nearly as much as I want you to be. Darling Tony—your eyes are full of love as you look at me now.”
He had held her more tightly, drawn her more near, and now, his haggard young face lighted with the sudden ardour of his conviction, he saw his light flash back to him from her, so that dropping his hands from her arms, he seized her, drew her down to him, enfolded her, and, feeling her yield, kissed her again and again.
“Bevis!” she whispered, amazed, aghast, yet, in her yielding, confessing everything.
When she drew herself away and stood up beside him, it was blindly, putting her hand out for the table, her face averted; and so she stood for a moment, while he saw that the colour bathed her face and neck. Then he saw that the tears rained down. He had, strangely, never seen her cry before, though he had seen her at the earlier moments of her great grief. She had been frozen, gaunt, lost, then.
“Darling Tony—forgive me.”
“Oh,” she wept, “it’s not your fault!”
“Yes, it is. Don’t ask me to regret it; but it is.”
“No; no. It’s not your fault,” she repeated. And she began to move away, blindly.
“Tell me you forgive me.” He had drawn himself up in his chair and looked after her.
“Of course I forgive you. I can’t forgive myself.”