Her manner changed. Shrinking, timidity, fear, fled for ever. In her overpowering rush of protecting love all the diffidences of temperament, all the bars which he had forced her to build around her instincts, were swept utterly away.
She went quickly up to him, folded him in her arms.
"Robert!" she said, "poor boy, the end has come to it all. I knew it must come some day. Well, we have not been happy. I wonder if you have been happy? No, I don't think so. But now, Robert, you have me to comfort you with my love once more, my poor Robert, once more, as in the old, simple days when we were young."
She led him to a couch.
He trembled violently. His decision of movement seemed to have gone. His purpose of flight had for the moment become obscure.
And now, into this man's heart came a remorse and regret so awful, a realisation so sudden and strong, so instinct with a pain for which there is no name, that everything before his eyes turned to burning fire.
The flames of his agony burnt up the veils which had for so long obscured the truth. They shrivelled and vanished.
Too late, too late, he knew what he had lost.
The last agony wrenched his brain round again to another and more terrible contemplation.
His thoughts were in other and outside hands, which pulled his brain from one scene to another as a man moves the eye of the camera obscura to different fields of view.