"Oh!" she cried, and sat up like one who has been struck. But his heart was full of fury, outraged hopes, and disappointment. He could not measure his words because she cried out.
"It was not your boats you burned, but my ship--my ship of dreams!"
He went further, he accused her of breaking his shrine, of succumbing to a vice that he detested and despised with all his soul. He said she had betrayed his love, and destroyed that quality in it which is essential and eternal.
"One must look up," he said, and looked down on her as she sat there, her face covered with her hands, very still under the torrent of fierce and cruel words that burst from him in the bitterness of outraged love and pride. Like all reserved people when driven into breaking silence he said too much. Afterwards there was a long silence. A curlew flying inland wailed faintly like a dying thing.
"I don't see what is before us," he muttered. "Everything is finished."
And at last she spoke--very quietly.
"Yes, everything is finished of our life together. But each of us is free to begin again."
"Free!" he echoed ironically, thinking of the mystical fatalistic threads that had bound and tangled them together from the first. "You and I will never be free of each other."
"Oh, yes--we are already. Listen! I want to tell you something that I ought to have told you long ago, only I was afraid of ... Ah! never mind of what I was afraid. But now that it is as you have said all over and finished, now that I see very well that not only do you not love me, but that you never have loved me and want nothing so much as to be free of me, I will tell it you--" and she added fiercely, "with pleasure."
"Tell ahead," he said drearily.