Hearing those words of his, suddenly I knew just what I wanted to say. I'd been like an amateur actress wild with stage fright, who'd forgotten her part till the right cue came. "There you're mistaken," I contradicted him. "I did love Jim Beckett."
Julian gave an excited, brutal laugh. "Tell that to the Marines, my child, not to yours truly! You never set eyes on Jim Beckett. He never went near your hospital. You never came near the training-camp. You seem to have forgotten that I was on the spot."
"I met him before the war," I said.
"What's that?" Julian didn't know whether to believe me or not, but his forehead flushed to the black line of his low-growing hair.
"I never told you, because there was no need to tell," I went on. "But it's true. I fell in love with Jim Beckett then, and—he cared for me."
For the first time I realized that Julian O'Farrell's "love" wasn't all pretence. His flush died, and left him pale with that sick, greenish-olive pallor which men of Latin blood have when they're near fainting. He opened his lips, but did not speak, because, I think, he could not. If I'd wanted revenge for what he made me suffer when he first thrust himself into my life, I had it then; but to my own surprise I felt no pleasure in striking him. Instead I felt vaguely sorry, though very distant from his plans and interests.
"You—you weren't engaged to Beckett, anyhow. I'm sure you weren't, or you'd have had nothing to worry about when Dierdre and I turned up," he faced me down.
"No, we weren't engaged," I admitted. "I—was just as much of a fraud as you meant Dierdre to be with Father and Mother Beckett. I've no excuse—except that it was for Brian's sake. But that's no excuse really, and Brian would despise me if he knew."
"There you are!" Julian burst out, with a relieved sigh, a more natural colour creeping back to his face. "If Jim Beckett let you go before the war without asking you to marry him, I'm afraid his love couldn't have been very deep—not deep enough to make him forgive you after all this time for deceiving his old father and mother the way you have. My God, no! In spite of your beauty, he'd have no mercy on you!"
"That's what I think," I said. "My having met him, and his loving me a little, makes what I've done more shameful than if I'd never met him at all."