“Ah, I’ve so wanted, through our horrid silence, to help you!” And he pressed to get more at the truth. “You’ve so quite fatally displeased him?”
“To the last point—as I tell you. But it’s not to that I refer,” she explained; “it’s to the ground of complaint I’ve given you.” And then as this but left him blank, “It’s time—it was at once time—that you should know,” she pursued; “and yet if it’s hard for me to speak, as you see, it was impossible for me to write. But there it is.” She made her sad and beautiful effort. “The last thing before he left us I let the picture go.”
“You mean—?” But he could only wonder—till, however, it glimmered upon him. “You gave up your protest?”
“I gave up my protest. I told him that—so far as I’m concerned!—he might do as he liked.”
Her poor friend turned pale at the sharp little shock of it; but if his face thus showed the pang of too great a surprise he yet wreathed the convulsion in a gay grimace. “You leave me to struggle alone?”
“I leave you to struggle alone.”
He took it in bewilderingly, but tried again, even to the heroic, for optimism. “Ah well, you decided, I suppose, on some new personal ground.”
“Yes; a reason came up, a reason I hadn’t to that extent looked for and which of a sudden—quickly, before he went—I had somehow to deal with. So to give him my word in the dismal sense I mention was my only way to meet the strain.” She paused; Hugh waited for something further, and “I gave him my word I wouldn’t help you,” she wound up.
He turned it over. “To act in the matter—I see.”
“To act in the matter”—she went through with it—“after the high stand I had taken.”