“After all,” he said, “if she’d wanted you she wouldn’t have taken me, would she?” He paused, and continued, arguing with himself as well as Andy: “Those Atterton girls have had heaps of chances. Neither of them would marry just for the sake of getting married. If Elizabeth hadn’t been willing, she would have said so.”
“Yes,” said Andy again. Then he pricked his numbed senses into a little semblance of life. “Oh yes, of course.”
“Don’t think I’m not appreciating the way in which you stuck to your part of the bargain,” continued Stamford, going uneasily towards the door. “You behaved awfully well.”
Then through the mist caused by pain in Andy’s mind loomed the image of Lady Jones. What had Lady Jones to do with it? Oh, he knew.
“It was only by an—an accident, that I did not break my promise and propose to her,” he said at last.
But when the words were out, he wondered why he had said them.
For a moment the two young men stood silent, while a great thought, unspoken, almost uncomprehended, vibrated between them.
“You never know——” was all Stamford could find to say. Then he struggled and brought forth a final word. “We all seem in the same box, somehow, if you only knew. Well, good-night.”
But they shook hands in the dark porch with an extraordinary vista opening out before both of them, blinding them for a moment to their own misery and triumph. They saw—those two ordinary young men on a doorstep—the road on which all creation moves towards the light. They knew that they were brothers.
Stamford kicked the mat. He wanted to go, and yet he could not get away.