"I did not say that." His foot was almost on the threshold of the door while he spoke.
"Stuart!" she exclaimed, hurrying toward him. The lithe symmetry of her shape was very beautiful now; her worst detractor could not have said otherwise. She felt that the man whom she loved was leaving her forever. She put a hand on either of his shoulders. She tried to look into his eyes while he averted his own.
"Will you leave me like this?" she went on. "You knew me long before you knew her! Don't let us quarrel. I—I confess everything. I—I have been very foolish. But you won't be too harsh with me—you will forgive, will you not?"
He did not answer her. He removed her hands. Then he receded from her.
"I have given you back your letters," he responded, standing quite near the threshold.
"Tell me one thing—do you love her? Is it because you love her that you want to part from me? I—I have scarcely seen you for weeks. You once said that a day wasn't a day unless you had seen me. Do you remember? I've been stupid. But you won't mind so much when you've let me explain more. Don't go quite yet. Stay a moment, and" ...
He had passed quietly from her sight. She waited until she heard the clang of the outer hall door. Then she understood what a knell it meant. The alienation must now be life-long. She had made him despise her, and she could never win him back. Seated before the fire, that snapped and flashed as if in jeering glee at her own misery, she wept tears that had a real pathos in them—the pathos of a repulsed love. She had never believed herself at fault in her conduct toward Claire. Jealousy had speedily blackened the filial act of her rival, but in any case the story, as Mrs. Twining told it, would have roused her conviction that this desertion had been a most unnatural and cruel one. So esteeming it, she had played the part of castigator. She was not sure that she would have done very differently if Claire had not been at all an object of her hatred. She had not found the least difficulty in persuading herself that it was wholly a moral deed to use with vengeful intent knowledge which she would have been justified in using with an intent merely punitory.
But now she had wrecked all her own future by seeking to destroy Claire's. Mrs. Twining had broken faith and betrayed her. The passion which she felt for Goldwin was an irrecoverable one. Her detestation of the woman who had caused their ceaseless parting grew as she wept over the ruin of her hopes, and mingled its ferocious heat with the more human tenderness of her tears. She passed a lurid hour, there in her little picturesque parlor; she was in spiritual sympathy, so to speak, with its Oriental equipments. She could have understood some of those clandestine assassinations which the poisoned draught, the stealthy bow-string, and the ambushed scimitar have bequeathed to history and legend. Her past pietistic fervors had left her with no memento of consolation. A stormy turbulence had taken hold of her mental being, and shaken it as a blast will shake a bough. In her sorrow she was still a woman; in her hate she was something grossly below it.
She at length remembered the letters that he had returned to her, and drew them forth from her bosom. For a moment the anguish of loss gained mastery in her soul, and she held the packet clasped between both hands, her eyes blinded to any sight of them, and her frame convulsed with racking, internal sobs. She knew that she must read them all over again, and thus replunge into coverts of memory whose very charm and fragrance would deepen her despair. To re-peruse each letter would be like prying open the slab of a grave.