He put them back in the bureau without a word. He felt that he had struck the innocent again and most cruelly.
Then he came back to the chair on which he had been sitting and stood holding its back.
“You see how we are both placed,” said he. “To prove your husband’s death, all my business would have to be raked up. I don’t mind, because I have acted straight, but you would mind. The fact of his suicide, the fact of his sending me home—everything, that would hit you again and again. Yet, look at your position—I do not know what we are to do. If I go away and go back to the States, I leave you before the world as the wife of a man still living who has deserted you, if I stay and go on being the Earl of Rochester, you are tied to a phantom.”
He paced the floor, head down, wrestling with an insoluble problem, whilst she sat looking at him.
“Which is the easiest for you to do?” asked she.
“Oh, me,” said he; “I’m not thinking of myself—back to the States, of course, but that’s out of the question—there are lots of easy things to do, but when my case comes in contact with yours, there’s nothing easy to do. Do you think it was easy for me to go off that night and leave you waiting for me, feeling that you thought me a skunk? No, that was not easy.”
She had been sitting very calm and still up till now, then suddenly she looked down. She burst into tears.
“Oh,” she cried, “why were you not him—if he had only been you. He cared nothing for me, yet I loved him—you—you—”
“I care for nothing at all but you,” said he.
She shuddered all over and turned her head away.