"Best for me?" he asked. Then he looked up, and with sudden passion, "Catherine!" he cried. "Believe me, I know that I can stay! Forget the wild and foolish things I said. No thought of mine shall wrong Charles—I swear it solemnly. Catherine!—do not bid me leave you. Cannot you trust my honour?" His eyes held hers, by turns they seemed to become beseeching and imperious.
Catherine Nagle suddenly threw out her hands with a piteous gesture. "Ah! James," she said, "I cannot trust my own——" And as she thus made surrender of her two most cherished possessions, her pride and her womanly reticence, Mottram's face—the plain-featured face so exquisitely dear to her—became transfigured. He said no word, he made no step forward, and yet Catherine felt as if the whole of his being was calling her, drawing her to him....
Suddenly there rang through the still air a discordant cry: "Catherine! Catherine!"
Mrs. Nagle sighed, a long convulsive sigh. It was as though a deep pit had opened between herself and her companion. "That was Charles," she whispered, "poor Charles calling me. I must not keep him waiting."
"God forgive me," Mottram said huskily, "and bless you, Catherine, for all your goodness to me." He took her hand in farewell, and she felt the firm, kind grasp to be that of the kinsman and friend, not that of the lover.
Then came over her a sense of measureless and most woeful loss. She realized for the first time all that his going away would mean to her—of all that it would leave her bereft. He had been the one human being to whom she had been able to bring herself to speak freely. Charles had been their common charge, the link as well as the barrier between them.
"You'll come to-morrow morning?" she said, and she tried to withdraw her hand from his. His impersonal touch hurt her.
"I'll come to-morrow, and rather early, Catherine. Then I'll be able to confess before Mass." He was speaking in his usual voice, but he still held her hand, and she felt his grip on it tightening, bringing welcome hurt.
"And you'll leave——?"
"For Plymouth to-morrow afternoon," he said briefly. He dropped her hand, which now felt numbed and maimed, and passed through the gate without looking back.