She picked up her handkerchief from the table where it lay beside her gloves and her cloak and twisted the delicate object in her hands, whose whiteness and transparency Bulstrode remarked. They were clever hands, and showed her temperament and showed also singular breeding for one born in the state of life from which she had come.
"Well," she said shortly, "as you have seen, I gave in—I gave in at last."
"Why," Bulstrode asked abruptly, "did he leave you?"
But instead of answering him, the girl said: "But you don't ask me why I sent for him to come?"
He was silent.
Here she hid her face and through her fingers he could see the red rise all along her cheek. Her attitude, and more what she implied than what she said, and what he thought and feared, made the situation too much for him. With a slight exclamation he put his arm about her and drew her to him. As she rested against him he could feel her relax, hear her sigh deeply. But, as he bent over her, she besought him to let her go, to set her free, and he obeyed at once.
"There," she said, "don't do that again—don't! Pollona left me because he was jealous of you."
But at this, in sheer unbelief, her hearer exclaimed: "Oh, my dear girl!"
"Oh, yes," she nodded, "when he found that I did not love him, that I could never love him, he forced me to tell him the truth. Oh, don't be afraid," she said, as though she anticipated his anger, "you are in no wise connected with it. He thinks of me as a romantic, foolish girl. He has laughed at me, tried to shake my faith, to destroy my ideal, but at least he was honest enough to believe me; and that is all I asked of him."
Not for a moment did Bulstrode feel that she was weaving a web for him. There was something about her so sincere and simple, she was so fragile and fine and fair, there was so much of distinction in all she did and said that it put her well nigh, one might say touchingly, apart from the class to which she belonged. Her art and her knocking about, instead of coarsening her, had refined her. She looked like a bit of ivory, worn by experience, and struggle, to a fine polish; there was a brilliance about her and he understood and felt, he instinctively saw and knew, that she was unspoiled.