"I had no idea you were so splendid, Bernard."
"But I am not splendid. I am not telling you that I am splendid."
"Of course you are not, you silly boy; you are trying to make out you are nothing at all. But I shouldn't love you as I do if I couldn't read between the lines. Oh, Bernard, what an idiot I have been about you. I used to think——" she paused and looked away.
"You used to think awful things of me," continued John, "that I took drugs, that I consumed whisky by the half-bottle, that I was a brute both to you and to my old father."
"Yes," said Elaine slowly. "I used to think I——" Then suddenly, and with the inconsequence of woman, she broke off and covered her face with her hands. She was crying softly and steadily. It was not John's business to comfort her. The only man who had the right to do that was the drink-sodden neurotic, who was still a prisoner in the nursing home. Nevertheless, in less than a minute John was kneeling before her.
"What is it, Elaine?" he asked in passionate anxiety. She looked at him with eyes bright with tears.
"It is the past, Bernard; I can't understand it. Those days, long ago, lie like a pain in my heart, always. You have grown so different. It is cowardly and mean of me to think of it, but I love you, Bernard, and I cannot bear to think there was a time when you were not as now." She paused for a moment, and a shadow, a twinge of agony crossed her face. She looked at John with affrighted eyes, then spoke in a low voice. "That night when you struck me, Bernard!"
John felt the blood quicken in his pulses. Some time in the past Bernard Treves had struck her. How and under what circumstances he could not guess. He turned away his head, so that the sudden rage which blazed in his eyes should not be visible to her. For a moment he was silent, then collecting his senses, he said quietly, and still without looking at her:
"Elaine, I swear that if in the past I ever raised my hand to you, ever was cur enough to strike you, then I know nothing of it. I have no memory of such a thing," he went on, speaking the truth.
"I tell myself that, in those early days, you were not yourself," conceded Elaine.