“Yes,” she admitted; “but—”
“May I not see it?”
“Nothing in it really matters,” she entreated. “It could never make any difference to me—now! Not even if it were true. Your past is as if it belonged to some other person I never saw and never can know. You believe that? Tell me you do!”
“I do,” he responded; “I do!”
“Then do not read it.”
“But suppose it is false. Either way, I would tell you the truth.”
“That is just it.” Her fingers clasped his on the cover. “I know you would. But I do not believe what it says! I cannot! You can never have done such things! Ah, is it not enough that I have that trust?—even,” she ended hurriedly, “though it would make no difference?”
His pulses were beating painfully. He drew her fingers gently from their hold and opened the magazine to a page turned down lengthwise. It was a critique of his drama of “Cain”—sole fruit of that last year in Venice—which he had himself called “a drama of madness” and in sheer mocking bravado had posted to John Murray, his publisher. He saw at a glance that the article was signed with the name of Germany’s greatest mind, the famous Goethe.
She was trembling. “Remember,” she said earnestly; “I have not asked you! I should never have asked you!”
Gordon translated the cramped text with a strange lurid feeling, like coming in touch with an ancient past: