Justine listened with suspended thread. "Yes—that seems a good plan."
"Will you see about the details, then? You know it's only a week off."
"Yes, I know." She hesitated, and then took the spring. "I ought to tell you John—that I—I think I may not be here...."
He raised his head abruptly, and she saw the blood mount under his fair skin. "Not be here?" he exclaimed.
She met his look as steadily as she could. "I think of going away for awhile."
"Going away? Where? What is the matter—are you not well?"
There was her pretext—he had found it for her! Why should she not simply plead ill-health? Afterward she would find a way of elaborating the details and making them plausible. But suddenly, as she was about to speak, there came to her the feeling which, up to one fatal moment in their lives, had always ruled their intercourse—the feeling that there must be truth, and absolute truth, between them. Absolute, indeed, it could never be again, since he must never know of the condition exacted by Mr. Langhope; but that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondary motive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for the step she had resolved on; there should be truth, if not the whole truth, in this last decisive hour between them.
"Yes; I am quite well—at least my body is," she said quietly. "But I am tired, perhaps; my mind has been going round too long in the same circle." She paused for a brief space, and then, raising her head, and looking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so with you?" she asked.
The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and took a few steps toward the hearth, where a small fire was crumbling into embers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf; then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I thought we had agreed not to speak of all that again."
Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. "I made no such agreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear each other's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else?"