"I am speaking honest, old girl; I am going. I might have gone without writing to you to come up and see me, and you would have been spared this, but I couldn't. I felt that I wanted to say good-bye, old girl, because—because you've been so good to me—more than I deserve. Because," there was a quaver in the speaker's voice, "because I believe it will be the last time."
"Dick!"
The listener, a fierce pain at his heart, heard the catch in her voice, the gasping way in which she ejaculated the name. The man continued:
"It is possible to travel too far on the downward road. So far that you get lost for ever and ever in the valley. I have been down a great big distance. There is a presentiment in possession of me that, somehow, I shall never come back to England. That I shall never come back to worry you again!"
"Dick! Dick! Dick!"
The listening man could hear the heart-breaking sound; the woman's sobs as she spoke. Despite Rigby, despite all, his heart went out to her. Involuntarily he stretched out his arms. They fell to his side again, empty. There was the door between.
"Don't cry. After all, it is perhaps for the best. See what a failure I am. If I drink myself to death perhaps it would be best. Pity it takes so long, that's all. See how like a blackguard I have behaved to you."
The listener could not see, but he knew her actions to be expostulating.
"Ah, it's so; it's so.... I know; I'm sober now. When I come out of it I lie thinking, thinking, thinking. Realize then what a foul beast I have made of myself. When I think how I have behaved to you—to you, my staunch, devoted, dear old pal, the one soul who has stuck to me through thick and thin, I hate myself, I hate myself; and I wonder you don't hate me too."
"You know I love you, Dick. You know that no soul in the whole world loves you as I do."