“Thank you,” he said forlornly; “you’re very kind.” And he drew his limp hand from hers, and leaned his elbows on the grass and his chin on his hands.
“Oh, Rupert, why didn’t you write and tell me?”
“What was the use of making you sad? You were always sorry for maimed things—even the worms the gardener cut in two with his spade.”
She was struggling with a growing desire to scream and shriek, and to burst out crying and tear the grass with her hands. He no longer loved her—that was the lesser evil. She could have borne that—have borne anything. But he was going to die! The intensity of her belief that he was going to die caught her by the throat. She defended herself instinctively.
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
“Don’t believe what?”
“That you’re going to die.”
He laughed; and when the echo of that laugh had died away in the quiet garden, she found that she could no longer even say that she did not believe.
Then he said: “I am going to die, and all the values of things have changed places. But I have done something: I haven’t buried my talent in a napkin. Oh, my Pretty, go away, go away! You make a fool of me again! I had almost forgotten how to be sorry that you couldn’t love me. Go away, go away! Go, go!”
He threw out his hands, and they lay along the grass. His face went down into the tangled green, and she saw his shoulders shaken with sobs. She dragged herself along the grass till she was close to him; then she lifted his shoulders, and drew his head on to her lap, and clasped her arms round him.