She bent her head, finding words impossible; and when the man had left the room, Fenwick hung back and stood staring at her.
“Well,” he said imperiously, “I am waiting for an explanation.”
She shook her head.
“Don’t expect me to be satisfied with signs. I must have chapter and verse.”
It was Claudia’s turn to be impatient. She sprang to her feet, her eyes passionately reproachful, her voice firm—
“But I will not say more! Words—words are absolutely vain, and yet you want them: you want my thoughts and feelings put into shape for you to handle them. Don’t you see, can’t you see, that your very lack of power to do this for yourself shows what a gulf has opened between us? If you loved me,”—her voice faltered and recovered itself—“if you loved me, you would understand without words—” She was going to call to witness her own power of entering into his feelings, but checked herself in time, for no tenderness in his manner had gained the right to wring admissions from her which she instinctively knew would be but food for his vanity. That night, tossing sleepless, she had sworn that she would not let him learn how she had suffered, and to make sure of this kept her face turned from him, fancying that he might read it there. But she raised her hand as she spoke, and when she broke off it dropped heavily by her side.
“No, I don’t pretend to be clever enough to understand you,” he said sharply. “You judge me harshly, you draw unwarrantable deductions, and refuse either to hear me speak or to speak yourself. How are we ever to hope to set matters right?” He stopped. The mere unexpected discovery that she could give him up, immeasurably raised her value, and yet at the same moment the thought of Helen Arbuthnot rushed into his brain. “I suppose,” he went on more quietly, “you are vexed with something I have done or left undone?”
“Is that it?” she asked faintly, with the same consciousness of tension in her speech—a tension which was growing well-nigh intolerable. “Perhaps—I don’t know—no, I think it is something much deeper. Whatever it is, I cannot change, but there need be no unkindness between us.”
“Oh,” he said scornfully, “you have the stock phrases at your fingers’ ends!” And then his better angel moved him to compunction. “Claudia, forgive me!”
It was the old intonation, the old tender tune which could yet shake her like a leaf.