"And have you thought," he asked in a constrained voice, "what you are going to do? I know you have sometimes regretted your work; do you intend—or perhaps you have already applied to Mr. Farningham?"
"No," she answered, and, unobserved by him, for he was staring down at the tablecloth with unseeing eyes, a deep pink flush made her look suddenly girlish, "that will not be necessary. I have, as you know, regretted my work, and of late I have sometimes thought that, things being as they were, you acted with cruel thoughtlessness in compelling me to give it all up. But in my new life there will be much for me to do."
"I do not ask you," he said, suddenly, hoarsely; "I could not insult you by asking...."
"I do not think," she spoke slowly, answering the look, the intonation, rather than the words, "that I am going to do anything unworthy."
But Dering, with sharp suspicion, suddenly became aware that she had changed colour, and that from pale she had become red. His mind glanced quickly over their comparatively small circle of friends and acquaintances—first one, then another familiar figure rose, hideously vivid, before him. He felt helpless, bewildered, fettered.
"Do you contemplate leaving me for another man?" he asked quietly.
Again Louise hesitated for a moment.
"Yes," she said at length, "that is what I am going to do. I did not mean to tell you now—though I admit that later, before the end, you would have had a right to know. The man to whom I am going, and who is not only willing, but anxious, to make me his wife, I mean his legal wife,"—she gave Dering a quick, strange look—"has great need of me, far more so than you ever had. My feeling for him is not in any way akin to what was once my feeling for you; that does not come twice, at any rate to such a woman as I feel myself to be; but my affection, my—my regard, will be, in this case, I believe, more enduring; and, as you know, I dearly love his children, and promised their mother to take care of them."
While she spoke, Dering, looking fixedly at her, seemed to see a shadowy group of shabby forlorn human beings form itself and take up its stand by her side—Jack Hinton, with his weak, handsome face, and shifty, pleading eyes; his two plain, neglected-looking girls; and then, cradled as he had so often seen it in Louise's arms, the ugly and to him repulsive-looking baby.
What chance had he, what memories had their common barren past, to fight this intangible appealing vision?