Katharine's hands fell.
"Let us go home," she said in a voice which was full of pain.
So in silence they descended the steep hillside.
In silence they went along by the river, and over the bridge, through the fir-woods, and up towards the Solli Gaard.
[CHAPTER XX.]
Katharine went straight to her room and threw herself on her bed. All her thoughts were of Clifford. Her heart was flooded with love and pity for him, a hundredfold intensified now that she knew his secret history. The manner of Marianne's death and the long-continued silent suffering of the man appalled her. She had known from the beginning that he had suffered acutely; but when she had called him the man with the broken spirit, she had little realised the torture which his gentle and chivalrous spirit was undergoing day by day, hour by hour. He had fought and conquered. She knew that. She knew that she, coming into his wilderness, had helped him to do that; even as he, coming into her wilderness of loneliness, had brought her a new life and a new outlook.
Judge him—judge him! The words rang in the air and echoed back to her.
"My belovèd!" she cried, "I shall yet be able to tell you all that is in my heart. You suffered—and she suffered too—that poor Marianne—and I saw her face before me when I turned to you—and, oh, my belovèd, we could only go home in silence."
Her genius of sympathy did not leave that poor Marianne out in the cold. Marianne's turbulent temperament, Marianne's jealous rages, all the impossibilities resulting from a wrong aura, were reverently garnered into Katharine's tender understanding. For she knew Marianne had suffered too; and that in that strange dream, that heart-breaking final communication between husband and wife, Marianne had learnt the truth, and the truth had killed her. She had gone to her death with a knowledge which was too much for her life. The truth and not Clifford had killed her: the truth, spoken in a defenceless moment.