He took her by surprise, for she had not stayed to watch him. Her impulse had been to scream, to weep, to give some vent to the pain that wrenched soul and body; and in the determination to keep hold upon herself she had gone straight to the back of the house, and was wrestling there with a refractory lock on a cupboard. She turned at his step a face drawn, white, and frozen into lines of pain, and looked at him with eyes that asked and yet were proudly defiant.
He went straight up to her and took her in his arms; and though she relaxed and her head lay passive on his shoulder, there thrilled through them both the sense of conflict, of individuality set against individuality. Their embrace did not lessen the strain, and after an instant, something of his own fierce grasp relaxed, and they stood, the dumb victims of emotions that were stronger than their wills, stronger than their aching desires to be at peace with each other.
She turned at length and looked at him with eyes of misery. “Oh, go!” she said. “It’s a hundred times worse than I ever thought anything could be. Think kindly of me as I do of you. We can’t help ourselves. I knew this hour. I felt it when we were happiest. It had to be.”
“What I want you to do,” Martin said honestly, “is to take into consideration my care for you and my protection. I can take care of you—can do it well. That ought to count for something.”
“O my poor boy, has it not always counted? I’ve leaned on you and your love, Martin. I’ve told you so a thousand times.”
“Yes, but you set against them a lot of trifles.”
“But I don’t set the trifles against them. I have never weighed one against the other—never for an instant.”
“But you know that you could.” Poor Martin here uttered helplessly what was, after all, at the bottom of his spleen.
“Ah,” she sighed. “Don’t judge me by what I know; judge me by what I’ve done and thought.”
“You’ve got to change,” he muttered. “I can’t. I’m right. You’re wrong.”