He obeyed and resumed his former pose, staring again out of the window. “Don’t let the servants hear what you say,” he went on, in the same dead tone. “It’s to be kept secret. And don’t let father come up to see me. He would be kind, but I can’t see him now.”
She drew in her breath sharply, but said nothing,—only laid her hand on his shoulder.
At this he swung about, as though the touch had loosened something within him. “It’s the ghastly—waste that gets me—so hard!” he cried, his face set with pain. “Death itself—that’s nothing! An episode! But to see so much loveliness, so much fineness, all go wrong—obliquely—to futile death as to—a climax! It’s unbearable!”
“Stacey! Stacey!” Catherine whispered.
“And it’s all my fault—”
“No! No! you mustn’t!”
“But yes! My fault! If I could only have gone on loving her, or if, not loving her, I had married her, things might have been different. Not so—complete a mess! We’d have become adjusted—somehow.”
Catherine drew up a chair swiftly and sat down close to him. “Stacey,” she cried unsteadily, her eyes shining with tears, “I beg of you—you mustn’t! The truth is bad enough,—ah, please don’t go beyond the truth! It was not your fault—only in as much as what happens to any one in the whole world is one’s fault. Poor lovely Marian!—there was something—I don’t know—something twisted in her.”
At this and at the soft compassion of her voice Stacey looked toward Catherine differently. “Twisted—it was what she called herself only half an hour ago,” he said in a gentler tone.
They were silent for a time. Something in the young woman’s clear presence comforted him.