She turned toward him with a sudden passion of sorrow. “It was you who required me to go!” she cried. “If only you hadn’t asked me to go!”
“I thought we were both doing what was right and kind. I’m sorry if it has proved that we were mistaken. But surely you do not blame me?”
“Blame you? No ... the word hadn’t occurred to me. I’m afraid I don’t understand our language very well. Who could ever have thought of such a meaningless word as ‘blame’? You might think little creatures—ants, or the silly locusts that sing in the heat—might have need of such a word. You wouldn’t blame an apple for being deformed, would you?—or the hawk for killing the dove? We are what we are—that’s all. I don’t blame any one.”
The bewildered Harboro leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “We are what we make ourselves, Sylvia. We do what we permit ourselves to do. Don’t lose sight of that fact. Don’t lose sight of the fact, either, that we are here, man and wife, to help each other. I’m waiting, Sylvia, for you to tell me what has gone wrong.”
All that she grasped of what he said she would have denied passionately; but the iron in his nature, now manifesting itself again, she did not understand and she stood in awe of it.
“Give me until to-morrow,” she pleaded. “I think perhaps I’m ill to-night. You know how you imagine things sometimes? Give me until to-morrow, until I can see more clearly. Perhaps it won’t seem anything at all by to-morrow.”
And Harboro, pondering darkly, consented to question her no more that night.
Later he lay by her side, a host of indefinable fears keeping him company. He could not sleep. He did not even remotely guess the nature of her trouble, but he knew instinctively that the very foundations of her being had been disturbed.
Once, toward morning, she began to cry piteously. “No, oh no!” The words were repeated in anguish until Harboro, in despair, seized her in his arms. “What is it, Sylvia?” he cried. “No one shall harm you!”
He held her on his breast and soothed her, his own face harrowed with pain. And he noticed that she withdrew into herself again, and seemed remote, a stranger to him.