BOOK II.
VIII.
“CHRIS!” she said.
She felt herself trembling all over; then, abruptly, mysteriously, and in the very act of uttering his name, she ceased to tremble, and it came flooding in on her with a shock of wonder that the worst was already over—that at last she was going to be free.
“Well, well,” she heard him saying, in that round full voice which always became fuller and more melodious when it had any inner uncertainty to mask; and “If only,” she thought, “it doesn’t all come back when he laughs!”
He laughed. “I’m so glad ... glad,” he reiterated, as if explaining; and with the laugh in her ears she still felt herself as lucidly, as incredibly remote from him.
“Glad?” she echoed, a little less sure of her speech than of her thoughts, and remembering how sometimes the smile in his eyes used to break up her words into little meaningless splinters that she could never put together again till he was gone.
“Of your good luck, I mean.... I’ve heard, of course.” And now she had him, for the first time, actually reddening and stammering as she herself used to do, and catching at the splinters of his own words! Ah, the trick was done—she could even see, as they continued to face each other in the searching spring light, that he had reddened, thickened, hardened—as if the old Chris had been walled into this new one, and were not even looking at her out of the windows of his prison.
“My good luck?” she echoed again, while the truth still danced in her ears: the truth that she was free, free, free—away from him at last, far enough off to see him and judge him!
It must have been his bad taste—the bad taste that could lead him into such an opening as that—which, from the very first, she had felt in him, and tried not to feel, even when she was worshipping him most blindly.