‘No,’ he said very slowly. ‘I would not have you refuse what he asks. It would be neither right nor just.’
In spite of the almost intolerable pain she was suffering, a glow of wonder rose in her eyes; and there was no shadow of doubt to dim it. At his worst, in the old days, he had always told the truth.
‘God bless you for that!’ she cried suddenly, and then her voice dropped low. ‘You have travelled far on the good road since we last talked together,’ she said. ‘Further than I.’
He shook his head gravely.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘You have led me, and I have followed.’
‘We have journeyed together,’ she said, ‘though we have been apart. We may be separated, as we must be now, to the end, but we cannot be divided any more. I wanted to tell you something else too, this last time, and you have made it easy to say it, and altogether right. It is this. I do not take back one word of what I said to you and wrote to you before I knew Montalto was coming home. I do not want you to think that I have changed my mind, or that the life we were going to lead seems to me now one little bit less good and true and honourable than it seemed to me that first time we talked together here.’
‘Do you think I doubted you for a moment?’
‘You might. But it is only that other things have changed. We have not, and I know we never shall, and in the end we are to meet where there is peace, and somehow it will be right then, and we shall all three understand that it is. Can you believe that too?’