"Oh, no, no," she murmured. "You cannot mean it! Do not think that I am angry with you. Do not think that I am blind to the enormous sacrifice that you are making. You are speaking on the impulse of the moment. Think of your future!"
"I am not," Rent cried. "If anybody had told me this yesterday I should have repudiated the idea with scorn and amusement. But yesterday and to-day are far apart, and I do not recognise myself as the same man. And I mean every word that I say. Otherwise, what would become of you? You could not go back to that man now. It is out of the question."
Kate Charlock pressed her hands to her eyes and shivered. The gesture was more eloquent than any words could be.
"Precisely," Rent went on rapidly. "Though I understand what is uppermost in your mind, you stand at the parting of the ways, both of which end in what the world calls folly. But is it folly for you to strike a blow for your just rights? And, really, you couldn't go back to the man whom you hate and despise."
"But there is a middle course," Kate Charlock murmured. "I can go out into the world alone. I can get my own living, as other unhappy women have done before me. And you will help me."
"That I will," Rent said. "Ah, I am afraid you do not realise what a terrible task it is. And, mind you, nobody cares for your future but me. You have no friends among the people with whom your life has been cast lately. Not one of them would stretch out a hand to save you."
Kate Charlock shook her head sadly. There was no occasion for Rent to tell her that, for she knew it far better than he did. In worldly matters this man was a mere child by the side of her. She glanced at her hands—those long, slim hands which had not done a day's work for the last six years. And Kate Charlock knew her limits. She knew perfectly well that she was not clever, that her mental equipment was slender. She read no literature, beyond the last thing in neurotic fiction. Her education had been quite perfunctory. Save in the direction of the stage, there was no opening for her. And, with all her great talents, a stage career was precarious, if not problematical.
She had nothing except her beauty and the sweet, alluring sadness of her smile. On one point she was resolved: she was never going to share an humble cottage with John Charlock. As she stood there, meek and resigned, with the slow dawning of a smile upon her face, she was reckoning up her chances as avidly as any Cheap Jack at a country fair. She saw the risks. She had a luminous grasp of the situation. Her mental vision was clear and cold as crystal.
She had done with John Charlock—of that there was no question whatever. She would be no slave of his any more, even if she had to live on the dry bread of adversity. There was an end of that. Possibly she might live upon the sale of her fine jewels till she could get a footing on the stage, but that was a slow process even to the cleverest. And here was this chivalrous fool holding the gate open for her to pass, ready to sacrifice his future for the mere shadow of one of her sweet, sad smiles.
Was the game worth the candle? she asked herself. She was regarding the crisis from her point of view alone. She was not giving Arnold Rent as much as a single thought.