"He won’t do it!" she tried to reassure herself. "He’s always making threats. He wouldn’t really do anything that might harm himself."
But she knew that Vincent didn’t always act from self-interest. His passions were very apt to overwhelm him, and malice was one of the strongest of his passions. He would enjoy exquisitely telling the wretched tale to Eddie.
For three months she didn’t draw a free breath. She tried to dismiss her terror from her mind. She said to herself, resolutely: "Don’t borrow trouble!" "Don’t worry about what may never happen!" "Don’t cross your bridges before you come to them," and all sorts of tags from her mother’s store. She faced Devery and Sillon every morning with the same hardy good-humour. She was dutiful and severe at home, as had become her custom, and to no living soul did she give the smallest hint of what she was enduring.
Every time a letter came from Eddie, or if a mail were missed, she expected the blow to fall, all her laboriously made plans to be destroyed, her pride and dignity trampled underfoot, all her life wrecked. She was utterly in the dark. She had no idea what was going on, or what had already happened, and she could take no steps to gain information. She could do nothing but wait.
Then came another letter from Vincent:
I am home on leave. That means that we shall very soon be going over. Good-by, Angelica! I have a hard, bitterly hard task before me. I must hurt Eddie and I must hurt you. As for me, there is nothing before me but death. Deserted and ruined as I am, I long for death. Your love was all that pleased me in life. With that gone, there is nothing but a waste, bleak beyond endurance. I shall only beg Eddie to forgive my vile treachery, as I beg you to forgive my sins against you. Forget your presumptuous and wicked dream of marrying that good man. That can never be. He will forgive you, as he will forgive me, but he will never forget.
Good-by, Angelica. I give you to God!
Vincent.
Asleep and awake that picture haunted her—a vision of Eddie, mud-stained, horribly pale, sitting on a box, with a candle flickering on the ground beside him, in a dugout with mud walls and great puddles of filthy water—the sort of thing she had seen in the cinema, ghastly, desolate, with an incessant play of rockets and bursting shells overhead; and Vincent standing before him in one of his fine attitudes, so handsome, so strong, so noble, telling him. She knew how he would dwell upon the details, with what colour he would describe her caresses, her kisses, heightening the temptation just as he would heighten his remorse.
It didn’t occur to her that Vincent might encounter some obstacles to a prompt meeting with his brother, with all the different services and all the vast battlefield to be considered. She fancied him being at once directed to Eddie’s dugout like a stranger in a village.