His head stirred, and he looked up at her, seizing her hands. “Is that true, Mary?” He kissed her hand suddenly.
“It’s true ... or why else should I be here, at this hour?” He was hopeless, she thought: he didn’t live for a moment in reality.
He hadn’t even thought it queer of her to be sitting there in his room long after midnight with his head on her knees. And suddenly she thought again, “If I’m his mistress, I can save him from her altogether. Nothing else can break it off forever.”
He was kissing her hands, and the kisses seemed to burn her. He was saying, “Mary, I’ve loved you always, always ... since the first time I saw you, but I only knew it when it was too late.”
“It isn’t too late, Philip. It isn’t too late.”
He was silent for a time, but she knew what he was thinking. He wasn’t strong enough to take life into his own hands and bend it to his own will, or perhaps it wasn’t a lack of strength, but only a colossal confusion that kept him caught and lost in an immense and hopeless tangle. Until to-night she hadn’t herself been strong enough to act, but now a kind of intoxicating recklessness had seized her—the sober, sensible Mary Conyngham. She meant to-night to take him and comfort him, to make them both, for a little time, happy. To-morrow didn’t matter. It would have been better if there were no to-morrow, if they could never wake at all.
It was Philip who spoke first. After a long silence, he said in a whisper, “I can’t do it, Mary ... I can’t. It isn’t only myself that matters. It’s you and Naomi too. It isn’t her fault any more than mine.”
For a moment she wished wickedly that he had been a little more like John Conyngham, and then almost at once she saw that it was his decency, the very agony of his struggle, that made her love him so profoundly. And she was afraid that he would think her wicked and brazen and fleshly. It was a thing she couldn’t explain to him.
There were no words rich enough, strong enough, to make him understand what it was that had brought her here. She had thought it all out, sitting for hours there by the window, in the light of the rising moon. She had felt life rushing past her. She was growing old with the passing of each second. She had seen a man killed, and afterwards Philip had himself come upon the body of a dead woman lying in the snow. Nothing mattered, save that they come together. What happened to her was of no consequence. Some terrible force, stronger than either of them, had meant them for each other since the beginning, and to resist it, to fight against it unnaturally as Philip was doing, seemed to her all at once a black and wicked sin.
He freed himself suddenly and stood up. “I can’t do it, Mary. I’ll go away.... You can spend the night here and leave in the morning. No one in the Town will know you haven’t spent the night at Shane’s Castle.”