At last the light had come. I saw everything in a flash. I suddenly realized the perplexities and profundities of human life. I felt shaken by a sudden pity for these two bound and unhappy spirits, at that moment so close together, yet groping so foolishly and perversely along their mole-like trails.
I was still thinking of the irony of it all, of the two broken and lonely young lives even at that moment under the same roof, crushed under the weight of their unseeing and uncomprehending misery, when the girl in the chair began to speak again.
"It was terrible," she went on, in her passionate resolve to purge her soul of the whole corroding blight. "I didn't dream what it would lead to, what it would cause. I dreaded every advance she made. It wasn't jealousy, it was more than that; it was fear, terror. She seemed to be feeding on me, day by day, month by month. I knew all the time that the higher she got the lower I had to sink. And now, in a different way, she's taken everything from me. Taken everything, without knowing it!"
"No, you're wrong there," I said. "She hasn't taken everything."
"What is there left?" was her forlorn query.
"Life—all your real life. This has been a sort of nightmare, but now it's over. Now you can go back and begin over again."
"It's too late!" She clasped her thin hands hopelessly together. "And there's no one to go to."
"There's Mallory," I said, waiting for some start as the name fell on her ears. But I saw none.
"No," she cried, "he'd hate and despise me."
"But you still care for him?" I demanded.