He had her hands in his, and was holding them against his breast. “Stop it—the marriage? Is that what’s troubling you?” He was speaking now as if to a frightened disconsolate child. “Of course you couldn’t stop it. I know how you must have loathed it; all you must have suffered. But Anne’s happiness had to come first.”
He did understand, then; did pity her! She let herself lie in his hold. The relief of avowal was too exquisite, now that all peril of explanation was over and she could just yield herself up to his pity. But though he held her she no longer saw him; all her attention was centred on her own torturing problem. She thought of him only as of some one kinder and more understanding than any one else, and her heart overflowed.
“But wasn’t it just cowardice on my part? Wasn’t it wicked of me not to dare to tell her?”
“Of course it wasn’t wicked. What good would it have done? It’s hard that she made the choice she did; but a girl with a will like Anne’s has to take her chance. I always felt you’d end by seeing it. And you will, when you’re less tired and overwrought. Only trust me to look after you,” he said.
Her tears rose and began to run down. She would have liked to go on listening without having to attend to what he said. But again she felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and she tried to smile back at him. “I do trust you ... you do help me. You can’t tell the agony of the secret....” She hardly knew what she was saying.
“It needn’t be a secret now. Doesn’t that help?”
“Your knowing, and not loathing me? Oh, that—.” She gave a faint laugh. “You’re the only one of them all who’s not afraid of me.”
“Afraid of you?”
“Of what I might let out—if they hadn’t always stopped me. That’s my torture now; that I let them stop me. It always will be. I shall go over it and over it; I shall never be sure I oughtn’t to have told them.”
“Told what?”