Her amazement questioned him. He dwelt long on her face, seemed to pluck some significance from it.
“You know,” he asked, “how it happened? How I—?”
She nodded yes.
Again he stared at her long and steadily.
“Don’t blame her,” he said slowly. “It was not her fault. Mine—mine!”
“Never mind,” she told him; “we can go to-morrow.”
To hear him accuse himself for that other was more than she could bear. Again he seemed to divine her.
“You don’t know, Florence, what happened that morning. I was—I am—” he seemed to contemplate himself—“something no woman could forgive! It left her in such a way—oh, wretched!” His head rolled on the pillow. His eyes drooped away from her.
Florence recalled how he had met her at the stair-foot with the letter in his hand and some greater trouble in his face. Then that angry insistence of his in the glass room had been simply reparation! He had known then that he loved the girl, and somehow known too late. And he had told Julia that! She saw with dreadful clearness. Did everything go back to the night when she had wanted and taken so ruthlessly what she desired? It was not Julia, but she, herself, who had led that leap in which he had fallen.
“I must get away,” she heard him mutter.