She had had her outburst; his was still to come. Yet it seemed rather as though he acted on a deliberate purpose than was carried away by any irresistible impulse; he spoke simply and plainly.
"I love you as I've always loved you," he said.
"I know, and I've taken advantage of it to inflict all this on you." Her eyes rested on his for some moments, and she answered his glance. "No, I can't escape that way. I'm not talking of running away; of course I couldn't do that." She laughed a little and even he smiled. "But I can't escape even in—in spirit by it. Sometimes I wish I could. It would change the centre of my life, wouldn't it? Perhaps I shouldn't mind the things that distress me so much now. But I can't."
"You don't love me? Well, you never did." He paused an instant and added in a puzzled way, "Somehow."
"Yes, it's all 'somehow.' Somehow I didn't; I ought to have. Somehow I've got where I am; and somehow, I suppose, I shall endure it." She laid her hand on his. "I should actually like to love you—in a way I do. I'm afraid I've very little conscience about it. But somehow—yes, somehow again—it's all a hopeless puzzle—I can't altogether, not as you mean. I understand it very little myself, and I know you won't understand it at all, but—well, Alexander imprisons me; I can't escape from him; as long as he's there he keeps me." She looked in Marchmont's face and then shook her head, half-sadly, half-playfully. "You don't understand a bit, do you?" she asked.
"No, I don't," he said bluntly, with an accent of impatience and almost of exasperation. Recognising it, she gave the slightest shrug of her shoulders.
"It's my infatuation again, I suppose, as you all said when I married him. It makes you all angry. Oh, it makes me angry too, as far as that goes."
"He's ruining your whole life."
She made no answer, relapsing into the still silence which had preceded her tears. Marchmont was baffled again by his old inability to follow the movements of her mind and the old sense of blindness in dealing with her to which it gave rise. Owing to this he had lost her at the first; now it seemed to prevent him from repairing the loss. In spite of all that they had in common, in spite of the strong attraction she felt towards him and of the love he bore her, there was always, as she had said once, at last a break somewhere, some solution in the chain of sympathy that should have bound them together. But he would not admit this, and chose to see the only barrier between them in the man who was ruining her life.
"You'd be yourself again if only you could get away from him," he murmured resentfully.