He understood instantly. "That's like you," he commented. "You're always like yourself, thank God." He walked away to the chair he had invited her to and stood behind it, gripping its padded leather back. "He wrote your brother a letter then." He had spoken, he thought, quietly and evenly enough, but the indignation he felt must have betrayed itself in his voice for she answered instantly:
"You mustn't be angry about that. He had to write to Rush, you see. Rush had been in his confidence about it all the while. Rush knew his hopes and his explanations. Rush knew of his coming yesterday, was waiting up at Wallace Hood's apartment for his news. Now, do you see how horrible it was? He couldn't tell Rush what I had said to him. There was nothing he could tell him. He couldn't even face him. He did the only thing I'd left for him to do."
March asked, "What has he done?"
"We don't know, exactly. Just gone away, I suppose. The letter was written about midnight from the University Club. He said he wasn't coming back to Hickory Hill. That he couldn't possibly come back. He'd arrange things, somehow, later. He told Rush not to try to find him nor make any sort of fuss, and to be very kind to me; not to question nor worry me."
She broke off there and looked intently up at him. In her eyes he thought he saw incredulity fighting against a dawning hope. "I wonder," she went breathlessly on, "if you can understand this, too. Can you see that, for him, the unbearable thing about it—was that it was ludicrous? The contrast between what he had believed me to be and—what I am?"
He interrupted sharply, with a frown of irritation, "Don't put it like that!"
"Well, then," she amended, "the contrast between his explanation of the way I had been treating him, and the true one?"
"That is a thing I think I can understand," he said. "It was a sort of—awakening of Don Quixote. To a fine sensitive boy nothing could give a sharper wrench than that.—I'm moving in the dark," he added. Yet he knew he was drawing near the light. The secret he had set out to discover was not very far away.
"You see well enough," she said. "Better than Rush, though I tried to explain it to him. He'd caught a surmise of the truth, too, I think, in New York, when he came back from France and brought me home. But he wouldn't look. Father wouldn't, either, once when I tried to tell him about it. It was too horrible to be thought,—let alone believed.—I don't quite see how I can have gone on believing it myself."
The look he saw in her eyes made him wonder how she could. He managed to hold his own gaze steady. It gave him a sense of somehow supporting her.