"I am going to say everything I have to say, if you never speak to me again. I feel as if I were standing on the point of a high rock and every side led sheer down into an abyss. It doesn't matter in the least down which side I fall. There is a certain satisfaction in that. But you shall listen."
"There is nothing you cannot say to me."
"And you'll not run away."
"Oh, no, I'll not run away! I shall never see you again if I can help it, but now that you are here I shall look at you and listen to the sound of your voice."
"And to what I have to say. You hate Mrs. Balfame. You are bored to death with her. You are appalled. You have found her out for what she is. You are going to marry her out of pity and because you are too honourable to desert a woman who will always be under a cloud, even if you had it in you to break your word; and because you have a twisted romantic notion about being true to an old if mistaken ideal—one of a set that has flourished like hardy old-fashioned annuals under the dry soil of hustle and ambition and devotion to your profession. You had fallen in love—or thought you had, which amounts to the same thing for the moment—after so many years of dry spiritual celibacy, and it had been a wonderful revelation—and an inner revolution that made you immensely interested in yourself for the first time. You were exalted; you lived for several months at a pitch above the normal, automatically registering other impressions but only half cognisant of them. And now—you feel that to the love born in delusion and slain by truth you owe the greatest sacrifice a man can make."
He had stared at the ground during the first part of her speech, and then raised his eyes sharply, his glance changing to amazement and a flush mounting to his hair.
"Oh!" he exclaimed. But he would make no other answer, and once more he dropped his glance to the snow.
"Are you going to marry her?"
"If she is acquitted."