“It seemed finally as if it might be almost better to let things rest as they were, to let that be the way of separating from you. I had almost made up my mind to do it, Aurora. Vincent has had me out for various airings, I have gone on 341several walks alone, but till to-day I avoided to take the road toward this house. I am so used to pain that I’ve grown stoical, you know, Aurora. I can stand any pain. I shut my teeth and say, ‘It will have to stop some time.’ But all at once it became too strong for me–not the pain, or the wish to see you, but the feeling that I could not bear to have you thinking me ungrateful. I, who hate ingratitude as the blackest thing in the wide world, to pass with you, with you, for an ungrateful beast!”
“Don’t! don’t, Gerald!” Aurora hushed him. “I can’t let you talk like that. You know you couldn’t be ungrateful, nor I couldn’t think it of you.”
“No, I’m not ungrateful. I’m not, dear,” he caressingly asseverated, and closing her two hands between his treasured them against his cheek. “I want you to be altogether sure of it. If I did not recognize the enormity of my debt to you, Aurora, what a clod I must be! Not, mind you, because, it is just possible to think, I owe you my life. Not that, but because you were so kind. Because you were so kind, so kind–” he reiterated feelingly, “and I a troublesome, cantankerous, distinctly unappetizing object in his helpless bed. Don’t think there was one touch or gesture of these dear hands that take away headaches that I do not remember with gratitude.”
“There was nothing to be grateful for, nothing at all,” insisted Aurora.
“And so when I wrote you in that brutal manner, dear,–”
“That letter was all right,” Aurora vigorously snatched away from him the turn to talk, in order to defend him from this misery of compunction. “It was prompted by the most gentlemanly feelings, by real unselfishness and consideration 342for me. You didn’t want me talked about on your account, and you put it as delicately as possible. Only I was a fool; I went off the handle, and wrote while I was mad and hurt and wanted to hurt back. But, bless you, I understand it all perfectly now. You needn’t say another word. I understand the letter, Gerald, and I understand you.”
“I am afraid,” he said, letting go her hands and drawing a little apart, as if the most complete misunderstanding, after all, separated them,–“I am afraid you do not entirely. But this much at least is clear to you, isn’t it, dear, that whatever I may be, I am not ungrateful? Whatever I may do, you are to remember that I couldn’t be ungrateful to you, Aurora. If I should seem to be behaving ever so, ever so shabbily, still you must know that behind it, under it, I am the very contrary of ungrateful.” He pressed his hands to his eyes again, and was still for a minute, before announcing, “I shall not come to see you for a long time.”
The astonished and acute attention of her whole being was indefinably expressed by the silence in which she now listened.
“I am going to keep away from you,” he went on, “till I feel out of danger.”
“Why, what’s the matter now?” she asked, with the vehemence of her surprise and disappointment.