He was quite right. She did not spring up. She did not call him to account for all his false representations. She bowed her head; she still had a vision of the bailiff before her eyes, and she answered with a sigh:
“Well, well—so long as you are innocent in this——”
“Don’t say that, Karen!” he said with tears in his eyes. “I feel that I have so much to answer for both to you and——”
“Oh, it may turn out all right in the end,” she said, her face turned towards the lamp. “So long as one doesn’t lose one’s honour.”
So that was over. He had not this confession to dread any longer; but he had never dreamt it would have been got through so easily.
“What is it, though?” he thought, as he rose from the table. He felt as if it were his duty to be unhappy, and now he could not. He kept his eyes all the time fixed upon his innocence in this one matter, and this feeling of innocence was like a lamp that suddenly shone upon his darkness; it illuminated everything, softened everything, so that the remorse and despair he had felt in the train, all that had chafed and wounded him earlier in the day, melted away into far-off, shapeless mist.
He had to go into the bedroom to look at the children, and he sat down on the edge of the bed in which the two little girls slept. In the train he had felt himself unworthy to bring children into the world, but now he was once more happy in being a father.
“How long do you think we shall be able to stay here?” she asked, when he came in again. “Do you think we shall have to move before I am laid up?”
It sounded so unusually resigned.
“No,” he said; “certainly not.”