"Isn't it in a hurry?" said Athena plaintively, "in such a hurry to end the last of my happy days." Her voice broke into a sob, and Lingard, at last looking straight into her face, saw that tears were rolling down her cheeks.
He gave a hoarse inarticulate cry. Athena thought he said "My God!" She was filled with a sense of intoxicating happiness and triumph. Each of the wild, broken words—words of self-abasement, self-blame, self-rebuke, which Lingard uttered, holding both her hands in his firm grasp,—meant to her what fluttering white flags of surrender mean to besiegers.
With downcast eyes, with beating heart she listened while Lingard, abasing himself and exalting her, took all the blame—and shame—on himself. His words fell very sweetly and comfortingly on her ears. Athena had no wish to act treacherously by Jane.
Any other man but this strange man would have had her long ago in his arms, but Lingard, though he held her hands so tightly that his grasp hurt, made no other movement towards her, not even when with a sobbing sigh she admitted—and as she did so there came across her a slight feeling of shame—that she, too, had been a traitor, an unwilling, an unwitting traitor, to Jane these last few days.
At last they made a compact—how often are such compacts made, and broken?—that Jane should never, never, know the strange madness which had seized them both.
Lingard spoke of leaving the next day. Nothing would be easier than to urge important business in London. But again the tears sprang to Athena's eyes.
"Don't go away," she murmured brokenly. "I couldn't bear it! I promise you that Jane shall never know. Don't leave me with Dick and Richard—they've both been kinder—indeed, indeed they have—since you've been here, Hew——"
He eagerly assured her that he would stay. Flight was a cowardly expedient at best, and the feeling he intended henceforth to cherish for Athena Maule was nothing of which he need be ashamed. It was a high, a noble feeling of compassion and respect. It was well, nay most fortunate, that they had had this explanation; henceforth they would be friends. The very touch of her cool hands resting so confidingly in his, had driven forth certain black devils from his heart—made him indeed once more true to Jane,—Jane who, if she knew all, would understand. For there were things Athena had told him of her life with Richard which Jane did not know,—things which it was not desirable Jane should ever know, and which had filled him with an infinite compassion for Richard's young, beautiful wife.
When Lingard bade her good-night, he resisted the temptation, the curiously strong temptation, of asking Mrs. Maule if she would allow him to kiss her feet.