“You learned before I did to distinguish between needing and wanting,” said Frithiof. “It comes to some people easily, I suppose. But I, you see, had to lose everything before understanding—to lose even my reputation for common honesty. Even now it seems to be hardly possible that life should go on under such a cloud as that. Yet the days pass somehow, and I believe that it was this trouble which drove me to what I really needed.”
“It is good of you to tell me this,” said Cecil. “It seems to put a meaning into this mystery which is always puzzling me and seeming so useless and unjust. By the by, Roy tells me that Darnell has left.”
“Yes,” said Frithiof, “he left at Michaelmas. Things have been rather smoother since then.”
“I can’t help thinking that his leaving just now is in direct evidence against him,” said Cecil. “Sigrid and I suspected him from the first. Do you not suspect him?”
“Yes,” he replied, “I do. But without any reason.”
“Why did he go?”
“His wife was ill, and was ordered to a warmer climate. He has taken a situation at Plymouth. After all, there is no real evidence against him, and a great deal of evidence against me. How is it that you suspect him?”
“It is because I know you had nothing to do with it,” said Cecil.
He had guessed what her answer would be, yet loved to hear her say the words.
It seemed to him that the dense fog, and the long drive at foot pace, and the anxiety to see the right way, and the manifold difficulties and dangers of this night, resembled his own life. And then it struck him how tedious the drive would have been to him but for Cecil’s presence, and he saw how great a difference her trust and friendship made to him. He had always liked her, but now gratitude and reverence woke a new feeling in his heart. Blanche’s faithlessness had so crippled his life that no thought of love in the ordinary sense of the word—of love culminating in marriage—came to his mind. But yet his heart went out to Cecil, and a new influence crept into his life—an influence that softened his hardness, that quieted his feverish impatience, that strengthened him to endure.