At length, sighing, she lighted the lamp and went about her tasks, with a bended head, wondering and frightened, fearfully questioning her own inscrutable heart. Was it for this only that she had fought herself all through that day: that she should attain an outward semblance of calm so complete as to deceive even herself, so frail as to be rent away and banished completely by the mere tones of his mastering voice? Was she to know no rest? Was it to be her fate to live out her days in yearning, eating her heart alone, feeding with sighs the passing winds? Or was she too weary to hold by her vows? Was she to yield and, winning happiness, in that same instant encompass its destruction?...
When it was quite dark, Whitaker brought a lantern to the door and called her, and they went forth together.
As he had promised, he had built up three towering pyres, widely apart. When all three were in full roaring flame, their illumination was hot and glowing over all the upland. It seemed impossible that the world should not now become cognizant of their distress.
At some distance to the north of the greatest fire—that nearest the farm-house—they sat as on the previous night, looking out over the black and unresponsive waters, communing together in undertones.
In that hour they learned much of one another: much that had seemed strange and questionable assumed, in the understanding of each, the complexion of the normal and right. Whitaker spoke at length and in much detail of his Wilful Missing years without seeking to excuse the wrong-minded reasoning which had won him his own consent to live under the mask of death. He told of the motives that had prompted his return, of all that had happened since in which she had had no part—with a single reservation. One thing he kept back: the time for that was not yet.
A listener in his turn, he heard the history of the little girl of the Commercial House breaking her heart against the hardness of life in what at first seemed utterly futile endeavour to live by her own efforts, asking nothing more of the man who had given her his name. To make herself worthy of that name, so that, living or dead, he might have no cause to be ashamed of her or to regret the burden he had assumed: this was the explanation of her fierce striving, her undaunted renewal of the struggle in the face of each successive defeat, her renunciation of the competence his forethought had provided for her. So also—since she would take nothing from her husband—pride withheld her from asking anything of her family or her friends. She cut herself off utterly from them all, fought her fight alone.
He learned of the lean years of drifting from one theatrical organization to another, forced to leave them one by one by conditions impossible and intolerable, until Ember found her playing ingenue parts in a mean provincial stock company; of the coming of Max, his interest in her, the indefatigable pains he had expended coaching her to bring out the latent ability his own genius divined; of the initial performance of "Joan Thursday" before a meagre and indifferent audience, her instant triumph and subsequent conquest of the country in half a dozen widely dissimilar rôles; finally of her decision to leave the stage when she married, for reasons comprehensible, demanding neither exposition nor defence.
"It doesn't matter any longer," she commented, concluding: "I loved and I hated it. It was deadly and it was glorious. But it no longer matters. It is finished: Sara Law is no more."
"You mean never to go back to the stage?"
"Never."