"Oh, so can I," she sighed. "But when will you be able to answer it?"
"Say in six months," he suggested. "Can you have all that patience?"
She nodded, and so, quite honestly, Caragh obtained his respite; though the arrangements for which he needed it were not entirely financial.
It was, curiously enough, the very honesty of the transaction which troubled his Celtic mind as he travelled eastward.
Since he had to hide from her the real necessity for postponement, he would have preferred to hide it behind the responsible audacity of a lie; behind something for which he could feel manfully and contritely accountable.
Deception was least endurable which did not compromise the deceiver. He hated the hedging truth.
He hated more things that morning than he often took the trouble even to think about, and they were mostly phases of himself. He was conscious too, as the train rolled across the weary strapwork of stonewalled fields, of a new sensation. He felt to have left a part of himself in Ballindra, fastened there securely, yet tied to him still by a thread that seemed drawn out of him, as the weaving filament from a spider's body, which, far or fast as he might travel, he could not break. It would hold him and bring him back.
The part which he had left there was the pledge he had given, the word of his honour; a word which had been a lie at best: yet no true oath that he had ever sworn had seemed to have half its sanctity. It was her belief that made it sacred and more binding than the truth.
The proud way she wore this mock jewel, as though it were a priceless stone, shut for ever the giver's lips upon its value.
If he had once loved her he might have faced her without disgrace in the day his love had died, but there was no grace left him now but his deception. That, henceforth, was to be the high thing, the stimulating fineness of his life; and, curiously enough, it woke in him a determination, manful and tender, which no real passion of the past had been able to arouse.