Elizabeth felt her face go suddenly white. Had she, too, made an awful, a lifelong, mistake? She knew the integrity of her purpose, when she had told Edith she did not love him, how she had said that simply and solely for Edith's sake, so that having definitely and irrevocably chosen not to give Edward up she might not be the prey of back-thoughts and gnawings. But what if all this misery, all this hunger, this unslaked thirst could have been avoided? What if she had rejected her great renunciation, had avowed her love for Edward, had given rein to the steeds of desire? Had her renunciation been no more than some savage heathen rite, some mutilation of herself and him? For a moment the very foundations of her world seemed to sway, and all its noble superstructure to totter. But Edith did not notice the blanching of her face, nor saw her quivering eyelids. She was looking fixedly at the spot in the lawn in front of her with an intent and absent air, and went on speaking in the same unemotional voice.
"I may as well be honest," she said, "because there does not seem to be much else left. As a matter of fact, I should not have done differently even if you had loved him. I did not care two straws for your happiness, nor for his, but only for my own. And yet I did love him; I was passionately fond of him. I thought I could make him love me, or at any rate that he would forget you. I told myself anyhow that it was but a sudden wild fancy he had for you, that he had fallen in love with your music. I did not care what I told myself, so long as I got him. And now at this present moment, I would give anything in the world if it could be made possible that I should still love him. I don't love him any more. I am not even jealous that he loves you. He may do as he likes, if only he could cease being kind to me. If only I could go right out of his life, and never see him again. But that's impossible. Soon I shall be the mother of his child. And, besides, mother would think it so odd. So would Mr. Martin. They would call me wicked, but I think it is really much wickeder to go on living with him. Yes, all the time that I was trying to get his love I was only poisoning my own. I was poisoning that which was dearer to me than anything in the world. I am sorry for it now. It lies before me quite dead, killed by me. Well, I can say truthfully that I am sorry. When you have committed a crime like that, the only possible palliation is that you are sorry. But I did love him; even when I gave my love that first dose of poison in refusing to let him go, I loved him."
She got up in agitation.
"Let no one say I did not love him!" she cried in a voice suddenly strained and shrill.
Elizabeth got up also, forcing down her terror at this tragic figure suddenly revealed to her, and full of growing pity.
"Edith, dear, you are talking wildly," she said. "You don't know what you are saying."
Edith put up both hands to her head.
"It is not wild talk," she said, "it is sober truth. But I express it badly; I get confused. And there was something I wanted to ask you. Was it really true what you told me?"
Then her face changed. The hardness and restraint faded from it; it became humanized again by suffering.
"Elizabeth, I feel so ill," she said. "I am in pain, in great pain!"