"That she should say those things!" repeated Reggie. "But when I understood it, I couldn't stop there. I don't remember very clearly what happened. I told her she was a wicked woman, and then I came away."
The excessive baldness of his narrative struck Mrs. Davenport as convincing, and she felt a little reassured. But Reggie had not meant to reassure her, and he soon undeceived her.
"Why should she have said those things to me?" he went on, getting up, and walking about the room. "Why, if she was like that, couldn't she have kept it from me? I should have been content to know only half of her, and to have adored that."
"Ah!"
Mrs. Davenport winced as with a sudden spasm of pain; then pity for Gertrude bred in her anger for Reggie. "What do you mean?" she said sharply. "I do not understand you in the least. You adored her, then; why not say love?"
"I didn't know it before," said he, "until this thing came, or, of course, I should have gone away. I am not a villain. But I know it now; I adored her, and I loved her—and—"
"And you do still?"
"Yes."
There was a long silence, and the hum of the London streets came in at the open window. Mrs. Davenport found herself noticing tiny things, among others that Reggie had placed the ornament he had been fingering perilously near the edge of the mantelpiece. In a great crisis our large reflective and thinking powers get choked for a moment, and the ordinary surface perceptions, which are as instinctive and unnoticed as breathing, are left in command of our mind. The sight of that ornament there assumed an overwhelming importance to her, and she got up from her seat and put it back in a safer place. Then she turned to Reggie, who was standing still in the middle of the room, with his back towards her.
"Sit down here, Reggie," she said quietly. "I think we had better talk a little. Do you quite realise what that means?"