“Part!” she cried. “Perhaps that is what you would like?”
“I would like anything better than this madness, Eve,” he answered wearily. “We cannot be worse than utterly wretched, and we are that now, and shall be as long as you harbour unworthy suspicions.”
His face looked like truth, his voice rang true. She flung herself on her knees beside his chair, and clasped and cried over his hand.
“I will not torment you. I will not plague and torture myself any more,” she sobbed. “It is only because I love you too much, and a breath makes me fear I may lose you. I will trust you, Jack, in spite of your mysteriousness, in spite of your refusing to show me that letter, which I had a right to see, a right as your wife. No husband should receive a letter from any woman which he dare not show his wife.”
“I did not choose to show you that letter.”
“Well, you did not choose, perhaps. It was temper, I dare say. I was like the children who are refused a thing because they don’t ask properly. I did not ask properly, and you snubbed me, and treated me as a child. But I won’t be Fatima again, Jack. If there is a blue chamber in your life, I won’t tease you for the key.”
“That’s my own good wife. Remember how happy we were at Bexley Hill, Eve, in our courting days, when you knew me so little and trusted me so much. Surely after two years of wedlock you should trust me more and not less—two years in which you and I have been all the world to each other.”
“Yes, yes, I was foolish. I hate myself for my mad jealousy. You have found the ugly spot in my character, Jack. I did not know it was there.”
“Shall I be angry with my love for loving me too well?” he said, as he folded the slender form to his heart.
How slender, how ethereal she was, the tall slip of a girl whose graceful shape had never developed matronly solidity. A thrill of fear ran through him at the thought of her fragility, too frail a sapling to stand firm against the storms of life.