"You mean," he responded gravely, "that you think I have not kept faith with Mrs. Rokeby?"
"Oh, can't you see? If you would only try, you must surely see!" she pleaded, with outstretched hands.
He shook his head not in denial, but in bewilderment. "I realized that I had made a mistake," he said slowly, "but I believed that I had put it out of my life—that we had both put it out of our lives. There were so many more important things—the war and coming face to face with death in so many forms. Oh, I confess that what is important to you, appears to me to be merely on the surface of life. I have been trying to fulfil other responsibilities—to live up to the demands on me—I had got down to realities—"
A laugh broke from her lips, which had grown so stiff that they hurt her when she tried to smile. "Realities!" she exclaimed, "and yet you must have seen her face as I saw it to-day."
For the third time, in that expressionless tone which covered a nervous irritation, he repeated gravely, "I am sorry."
"There is nothing more real," she went on presently, "there is nothing more real than that look in the face of a living thing."
For the first time her words seemed to reach him. He was trying with all his might, she perceived, he was spiritually fumbling over the effort to feel and to think what she expected of him. With his natural fairness he was honestly struggling to see her point of view.
"If it is really like that," he said, "What can I do?"
All her life, it seemed to Corinna, she had been adjusting the difficulties and smoothing out the destinies of other persons. All her life she had been arranging some happiness that was not hers. To-night it was the happiness of Alice Rokeby, an acquaintance merely, a woman to whom she was profoundly indifferent, which lay in her hands.
"There is something that you can do," she said lightly, obeying now that instinct for things as they ought to be, for surface pleasantness, which warred in her mind with her passion for truth. "You can go to see her again."