“I’ve told you the idea was not mine.” He cast about. “She may have been afraid that Owen——”
“But that was not a reason for her asking you to tell me that you hardly knew her—that you hadn’t even seen her for years.” She broke off and the blood rose to her face and forehead. “Even if she had other reasons, there could be only one reason for your obeying her——” Silence fell between them, a silence in which the room seemed to become suddenly resonant with voices. Darrow’s gaze wandered to the window and he noticed that the gale of two days before had nearly stripped the tops of the lime-trees in the court. Anna had moved away and was resting her elbows against the mantel-piece, her head in her hands. As she stood there he took in with a new intensity of vision little details of her appearance that his eyes had often cherished: the branching blue veins in the backs of her hands, the warm shadow that her hair cast on her ear, and the colour of the hair itself, dull black with a tawny under-surface, like the wings of certain birds. He felt it to be useless to speak.
After a while she lifted her head and said: “I shall not see her again before she goes.”
He made no answer, and turning to him she added: “That is why she’s going, I suppose? Because she loves you and won’t give you up?”
Darrow waited. The paltriness of conventional denial was so apparent to him that even if it could have delayed discovery he could no longer have resorted to it. Under all his other fears was the dread of dishonouring the hour.
“She has given me up,” he said at last.
XXVIII
When he had gone out of the room Anna stood where he had left her. “I must believe him! I must believe him!” she said.
A moment before, at the moment when she had lifted her arms to his neck, she had been wrapped in a sense of complete security. All the spirits of doubt had been exorcised, and her love was once more the clear habitation in which every thought and feeling could move in blissful freedom. And then, as she raised her face to Darrow’s and met his eyes, she had seemed to look into the very ruins of his soul. That was the only way she could express it. It was as though he and she had been looking at two sides of the same thing, and the side she had seen had been all light and life, and his a place of graves...