The dessert and the wine came at last and she went—
"I'll be in the library, Roddy," she said.
He gave her a quarter of an hour, and in that pause, with the house quite silent all about her and the fire crackling and the lights softly shining, she strove to discipline her mind.
She had known as soon as she had seen them there that the most awful element in it was that this had in no way altered the earlier case—it merely precipitated a crisis and demanded a definition. Nothing could have proved to her that she had never loved Roddy so much as her own feeling at this crisis towards him. Therein lay her own sin.
It was simply now of the future that she must think. The awful chasm that might divide them after this night, were not their words most carefully ordered, shook her with fear; peril to herself, for she could stand aside and see herself quite clearly: and she knew that if to-night she and he were to say things that they could neither of them afterwards forget, then, for herself, and from her deep need of love and affection, there was temptation awaiting her that no disguise could cover.
Then, as more clearly she figured the scene in the garden, patience seemed difficult to command.
She hated Nita Raseley—that was no matter—but she despised Roddy, and were he once to-night to see that contempt she knew that his after remembrance of it would divide them more completely than anything else could do.
When he came in she had still no clearer idea of what she intended to say, or how she wished things to go. She was sitting in an arm-chair by the fire with her hands shielding her face, and he sat down opposite her and stared at her and cleared his throat and wished that she would take her hands down and then finally plunged:
"Rachel—I don't know—I can't—hang it all, what can I say? I've been a beastly cad and I'd cut my right hand off to have prevented it happening——"
She took her hand down and turned towards him—