“Well,” her voice just went on, “it isn’t that I’ve really anything to say; you’ll think me silly, and I’m sure I don’t want to keep you when you want to go to sleep. But it isn’t often that we have anything very much to say to one another; it isn’t, at any rate, very often here. We’ve hardly, you know, talked at all since we’ve been here.
“But these last few days I’ve been thinking, realising perhaps, that it’s been my fault all these years that things haven’t been happier. . . . I don’t think I’d thought about anyone except myself. . . . In some sort of way I hadn’t considered you at all; I don’t quite know why.”
She paused as though she expected him to say something, but he made no sound.
Then she went on: “I suppose you’ll think it foolish of me, but I feel as though everything has been different from the moment that we came here, from the moment that we came to Treliss; you have been quite different, and I am sorry if I have been so disagreeable, and I’m going to try, going to try to be pleasanter.”
She brought it out with a jerk, as though she were speaking under impulse, as though something was making her speak.
And he didn’t know what to say; he could say nothing—his only emotion that he was angry with her, almost furious, because she had spoken like that. It was too bad of her, just then, after all these years. There had, at any rate, been some justification before, or, at least, he had tried to persuade himself that there was, in his relations with Mrs. Lester. He had been driven by neglect, lack of sympathy, and all the rest of it; and now, suddenly, that had been taken away from under his feet. Oh! it was too bad.
And then his suspicions were aroused again. It was so unlike her to behave like that. Perhaps she was only behaving like this in order to find out, to sound him, as it were. Oh, yes! it was a clever move; but he couldn’t say anything to her, the words refused to come.
She waited, a little pathetically, there on the bed, for him to speak; and then as nothing came, still without looking at him, she said quietly “Good-night,” and stepped softly across the room.
He heard her switch the light off, the bed-clothes rustled for a moment, and then there was silence.