"And will you help me?" she asked. "Oh, Lily! I have been down into hell. And I didn't believe in it till I went there. But so it is—an outer darkness."
She said it quite simply and earnestly, without bitterness, or the egotism which want of reticence so often carries with it. Round them early summer was bright with a thousand blossoms and melodies; the mellow jangle of church bells was in the air; the time of the singing-bird had come.
"But I can't feel—I am numb. I don't know where to go, or where I am going," she went on, her voice rising. "I only know that I don't want to go back to the life I have hitherto led; but there is nothing else. The great truths—God, religion, goodness—which mean so much, so everything to you, are nothing to me. I feel no real desire to be good, and yet I want to be not wicked. One suffers for being wicked. I can get no higher than that."
"Stick to that, dear Kit," said Lily. "I can tell you no more. Only I know—I know that, if one goes on doing the thing one believes to be best, even quite blindly, the time comes that one's eyes are slowly opened. Out of the darkness comes day. One sees from where one has come. Then one look, and on again."
"But for ever, till the end of one's life?" asked Kit.
"Till the end of one's life. And the effort to behave decently has a great reward, which is decent behaviour."
"And Jack—what am I to say to Jack?"
"All you feel."
"Jack will think it so queer," said Kit.
"You did not see Jack when you were at your worst that afternoon. Oh, Kit! it is an awful thing to see the helpless anguish of a man. He will not have forgotten that."