He did not reply at once, not trusting himself to speak. Lady Betty, too, looked sadly down.
"Ah, yes," he conceded at last. "It is an ideal home for an artist!"
There were bitter implications in his tone, and she made no pretence of not perceiving them.
"Darling," she said, "you know it would be the dream of my life to help you. That is the only meaning happiness would have for me—to live by your side and help your work and your life. Before everything else, I am not the solemn, dignified being—the thought of me you keep for Sunday," she interposed smilingly—"but a mere human being, a simple woman, for whom the love of the right man, once she has found him, is the principal thing in life."
"I can't realise that you are going away," he broke out. "I want to keep you with me always. Don't leave me, darling! Let us begin our life anew—now, this minute! An ideal home here! I hate and loathe it. Let us make a home together—a home of our very own—far away from all these associations. Let us laugh at all else. I am strong enough to throw over everything, to fight!"
She read the passion in his vivid face, in his terrible movement towards her. She stepped back, and held up her hands to check him.
"It cannot be," she said. "Perhaps we are to blame for delaying our parting. Believe me, I thought and thought about it after our first meeting till I feared I should go mad. I felt I had already made my great blunder—I had revealed the awful secret of my life. I had till then nursed it all alone, but when I saw you again, after those miserable years, I had to pour it out. I did so recklessly, unthinkingly; it was such a joy to feel there was one friend in the world to whom such things could be said, and I put no curb on myself. And afterwards I was bitterly sorry."
"No, no, darling," he interposed. "You hurt me."
"Don't misunderstand, please. It was splendid to think that you shared my confidence; above all that you had cared for me as I had cared for you in the old days. But yet I was tortured incessantly. You had contracted other ties; there were your duties to others, and the tangle was horrible! After I left you on that first day I was determined that, if I was to be an influence in your life at all, I must be the first to keep you true to your duties. You and I are enlightened, you see. We have the advantage over these simpler souls. Therefore we must efface ourselves to leave them their simple rights."
He stood humbly; silent before her gentle and unanswerable rebuke.