"You gave him great happiness," he suggested gently, "in the only manner in which it was possible. Remember only that. He must in any case have died."
He imagined that she hardly heard him, absorbed in the desolation of her own thought; and when she turned to him again, quite ready for departure now, he saw by the hard light in her eyes that she had recurred to her husband, to the irreparable gulf which must henceforth divide them.
"I can't go back to him," she whispered, as if she communed with herself. "I hate him; yes, I hate him, with my whole soul. He has lied to me too much; he has made me do such a cruel wrong. There are things which one can't forgive. Ah, no! it's not possible."
Oswyn viewed her compassionately, while a somewhat bitter smile played about his mouth.
"No, you will go back, Mrs. Lightmark! Forgive me," he added, raising his hand, interrupting her, as she seemed on the point of speech. "I don't want to intrude on you—on your thoughts, with advice or consolation. They are articles I don't deal in. Only I will tell you—I who know—that in revolt also there is vanity. You are bruised and broken and disillusioned, and you want to hide away from the world and escape into yourself, or from yourself; it's all the same. Ah, Mrs. Lightmark, believe me, in life that is not possible, or where it is most possible is in a crowd. Go back to your guests; I know, you see, whence you come; take up your part in the play, the masque; be ready with your cues. It's all masks and dominoes; what does the form or colour of it matter? Underneath it all you are yourself, with your beautiful sorrow, your memories, your transcendent happiness—nothing can touch that; what does it matter?"
"Happiness!" she ejaculated, rather in wonder than in scorn, for in spite of her great weariness she had been struck by the genuine accent struggling through his half ironical speech.
"Most happy," he said, with a deep inhalation. "Haven't you an ideal which life, with its cruelties, its grossness, can never touch?"
Then he added quickly, in words of Philip Rainham, which had flashed with sudden appositeness across his mind.
"Your misery has its compensation; you have been wronged, but you have also been loved."
"Ah, my friend!" she cried, turning toward the picture with a new and more beautiful illumination in her eyes, "was it for this that you did it?"