“I go to England?” he exclaimed. “God forbid! No, you would go without me.”
“Without you?”
Peterson sprang up and began pacing restlessly to and fro.
“Yes, without me. I’m going away. I—I can’t stay here any longer. I’ve tried, Jean, for your sake”—he looked across at her with a kind of appeal in his eyes—“but I can’t stand it. I must move on—get away somewhere by myself. Beirnfels—without her——”
He broke off abruptly and stood still, staring down into the heart of the fire. Then he added in a wrung voice:
“It will be a year ago... to-morrow.”
Jean was silent. Never before had he let her see the raw wound in his soul. Latterly she had divined a growing restlessness in him, sensed the return of the wander-fever which sometimes obsessed him, but she had not realised that it was pain—sheer, intolerable pain—which was this time driving him forth from the place that had held his happiness.
He had appeared so little changed after Jacqueline’s death, so much the wayward, essentially lovable and unpractical creature of former times, still able to find supreme delight in a sunset, or an exquisite picture, or a wild ride across the purple hills, that Jean had sometimes marvelled, how easily he seemed able to forget.
And, after all, he had not forgotten—had never been able to forget!
The gay, debonair side which he had shown the world—that same rather selfish, beauty-loving, charming personality she had always known—had been only a shell, a husk hiding a hurt that had never healed—that never would find healing in this world.