And again there fell between them one of those long silences which played a curious part in a conversation neither ever forgot.
At last Laura did answer Oliver's dangerous question. "I have always known in my heart that your mother was right in making me do what she did—I mean in persuading me that for my little girl's sake I must go on. Alice loves her father, though I think, perhaps foolishly, that of the two she cares for me best——"
"Of course she does!" he exclaimed.
"But whether that be so or not, I know what a terrible thing it would have been for Alice if Godfrey and I had lived apart. I've never doubted that—I don't doubt it now. But for that I could not go on—after what happened the other day."
"Then if, as is of course possible, you and I don't meet again for years and years, am I to think of you as always going on in exactly the same way?" he asked.
Some cruel devil outside himself had seemed to force him to utter the hopeless question which he had already made up his mind should be, must be, answered by Fate in the negative.
They had stopped their slow pacing side by side, and he was now looking down into her sad, desolate eyes. He saw the word—the one word "Yes," form itself on her quivering lips.
"Do you really mean that, Laura? Answer me truly."
And then suddenly there came over Laura Pavely an extraordinary sensation. It was as if this man, whose burning eyes were fixed on her face, were willing her to say aloud something which, however true, were better left unsaid. "There will never come any change," she answered, feeling as if the words were being forced out of her, "till, as the Marriage Service says, 'death us do part.'"
"Do you ever think of that possibility?"