"Yes, it is," he insisted. "He took advantage of my absence——"
"What I did," she interrupted, "was of my own free will—was what I felt I had the right to do."
His eyes lifted to hers in amazement. Again they found her gaze steady and direct. "Don't you realize what you've done?" he exclaimed. Such an expression as hers must mean either innocence or a shamelessness beyond belief.
"Yes, I realize," she answered in the same calm colorless tone in which she had spoken all her few words.
"How like a child you are," said he gently—and child-like she certainty looked, sitting there all in white, so small and lovely and sweet, with her heavy braids twisted round her little head, giving her appearance a touch of quaintness, of precocious gravity. "A mere child. You don't even understand what you're accused of. It simply can't be true—it—" He started up. "My God—if only I hadn't seen that room that night!" And she knew he was seeing what she was seeing—Basil's disheveled room—and she in it, like it. "Courtney! Courtney! How could you—how could you!" And down he sank with face buried in his hands and shoulders heaving.
She hung her head in shame. In vain she reminded herself how he had refused to treat her as a human being, how he had spurned all her appeals, how he had refused to let her live either with him or without him—would give her neither marriage nor divorce. All in vain. Before his grief she could feel only her own deceit. It might be true that he had not allowed her to be honest; it was also true that she had not been honest.
When she looked at him again, she was fascinated by the expression of his long aristocratic profile—stern, inscrutable. "I realize," he presently said, "that I don't know or understand you at all. But of one thing I'm certain—that you are not a bad woman. I've been recalling you from the beginning—from our childhood even. You never were bad. I can remember only sweet and beautiful things about you."
She covered her face with her arm. "Don't!" she murmured.
"I wasn't saying that to make you ashamed," he hastened to explain. "I can't help feeling that somehow or other I am more to blame than you. But that's aside. The main thing is, we must both do the best we can to straighten things out. Isn't it so?"
To straighten things out! Not to rave and curse and kill—not scandal on scandal, disgrace on disgrace—but—"to straighten things out." She pressed both hands to her face, flung herself upon the pillow and sobbed into it—an outburst like a long-pent volcano relieving itself of the fiery monsters that have been tormenting its vitals.