He was unconscious of any surprising experience, and did not give a thought to what might be passing in the girl's mind.
And she, sitting there with that wrecked air of passion, seemed as utterly indifferent how she appeared to him.
"You were right," he said at length, looking straight before him: "I've done it all for myself."
She gave him, without turning, a glance from her exhausted eyes, but took no further notice.
"I'm going back because I daren't fail her. I think too little of myself, God knows, to risk thinking less. Can you understand that? I was falling lower and lower, losing hope that I could ever be constant to anything that loved me. Then she came. It hadn't mattered with the others. I was only something to them that any one could be. But she was different—different because she had never loved before, and I meant everything to her that love can mean to a woman's life, everything that is sacred and tender and divine. And I saw in keeping her love pure and happy the one thing that could lift me out of the pit and let me look myself in the face again. It's the one chance that's been given me, and if I can't take it I'm done for. Yes, it's sheer selfishness, as you said; but I'm going back to her. Do you understand?"
She did not move nor look round at him. "You love me," she said dully.
"It makes no difference," he answered.
She gave a little mirthless laugh.
"But it will," she said; "it will. You'll remember me when she can't understand you, and my kisses when you're sick of hers, and my arms when she's asleep beside you. You won't think then that it makes no difference. You won't say then that she was the one chance for you. You'll remember then that a woman loved you whose love was all that you had dreamed. Maurice, Maurice, you're not the sort of man that makes a saint!"
He turned to her and put out his hand. "I'm going," he said. "Good-bye!"