"I didn't mean to hurt you, Hetty. Good Lord! you know that! You must know it!" he exclaimed. "And no one will know. You needn't care."
"Oh, needn't care!" she cried in scorn.
Then, manlike, because he was sorry, but had no answer, he became angry.
"You are a hard woman," he said, in a sudden letting-go of all self-control—"a hard and heartless woman."
She shrank from him as if he had struck her, and her face grew white.
"I wish you wouldn't," she whispered passionately—"wouldn't speak to me. You hurt me."
He did not understand, and his face hardened, and his eyes grew hot with impotent anger. It was as if all the conventions had dropped away from him, and he had become the primitive man. He could crush her with one hand, he blindly told himself; yet she mocked him and his strength. All his life he had loved her, followed her in devoted service, but to what end? To be shunned, eluded, mocked, and scorned. He gripped his hands tightly together in his revolt against his enforced inaction because she was weak and a woman. But for once he would speak.
"You've hurt me for many a long year," he answered hotly, "but you'll hurt me no more." With that he walked away as Cromwell must have gone from the Long Parliament.