"I don't care who knows. I don't care what happens!" Cleopatra exclaimed hoarsely. "You needn't imagine I want you to shield me. I did it on purpose, and they must know I did it on purpose."
Lord Henry frowned. "Yes, quite so," he continued. "You have suffered so much of late that you disbelieve in anything but unhappiness. You feel it must be interminable. It was all my fault. You fancy that you are alone, with a bitter hostile world arrayed against you. And since the world is your enemy, what do you care what the enemy thinks of you? Very natural too! That is what you feel. If only, if only, Leonetta had not been so slow in walking home this morning! It was hard luck on me that you should have been driven to this, because I was aiming at something so very different. However, it seems even harder luck that you should imagine that you were driven to it by me. But fancy! only a flesh wound in the shoulder, and it's all over! God! how thankful I am. And they must believe it was my accident. For did I not come to do you good, and had I not succeeded?"
"Better have left me alone," exclaimed the girl with a bitter smile. "I wish I could go away. I want to leave this hateful place!"
"Wherever you go, whatever you do, understand," said Lord Henry, "I am going to stick close to you. So don't imagine you can drive me away."
She stopped a moment. They had reached the churchyard, and she extended an arm to the nearest tree to steady herself.
"Why don't you leave me?" she demanded. "Can't you see that I have been tormented enough? I hate everything and everybody! I want to forget; I want to be alone."
Lord Henry was silent and led the way back to the inn.
"You are doing what hundreds have done before you," he observed after a while, "and always with disastrous results. You are condemning a man unheard. Until this morning I was your friend, your most useful ally here. You knew it, you felt it. I did everything in my power to bring about a change in the balance of advantages, which was all in your favour. You saw the proof of this. You drew strength from the very change I created. You know you did; you cannot deny it. I worked with zeal and with effect. God! if I worked with the same zeal for all my patients I should be dead in a fortnight."
"Well?" she cried.
"Then you were told something by third parties,—something that seemed to destroy in an instant all the careful work of my three days here. You believed that there was only one interpretation of this thing, and that was that my purpose all along had been so hazy and my nature so capricious and irresponsible that I had suddenly resolved to reverse the whole of the elaborate machinery which I had set in motion to re-establish your health and spirits;—and what for?—in order, if you please, to win the flattering smile of a mere child! Do you imagine that even my love for your wonderful mother would ever have allowed me to right-about-wheel all of a sudden in that ridiculous fashion? Come, Cleopatra, be reasonable."