"You used to care for me, Jerry. I'm not expecting that now; but if you'd only believe me when I say I'm sorry——"
"I believe you, Elizabeth."
"One of the nurses here says——Jerry, won't you look at me?" With some difficulty he met her eyes. "She says that because one starts wrong one needn't go wrong always. I was ashamed to write. She made me do it."
She held out an appealing hand, but he did not take it. All his life he had built up a house of morality. Now his house was crumbling and he stood terrified in the wreck. "It isn't only because I've been hurt that I—am sorry," she went on. "I loathed it! I'd have finished it all long ago, only—I was afraid."
"I would rather have found you dead!"
There is a sort of anesthesia of misery. After a certain amount of suffering the brain ceases to feel. Jerry watched the white curtain of the screen swaying in the wind, settled his collar, glanced at his watch. He was quite white. The girl's hand still lay on the coverlet. Somewhere back in the numbed brain that would think only little thoughts he knew that if he touched that small, appealing hand the last wall of his house would fall.
It was the Dummy, after all, who settled that for him. He came with his afternoon offering of cracked ice just then and stood inside the screen, staring. Perhaps he had known all along how it would end, that this, his saint, would go—and not alone—to join the vanishing circle that had ringed the inner circle of his heart. Just at the time it rather got him. He swayed a little and clutched at the screen; but the next moment he had placed the bowl on the stand and stood smiling down at the girl.
"The only person in the world who believes in me!" said the girl bitterly. "And he's a fool!"
The Dummy smiled into her eyes. In his faded, childish eyes there was the eternal sadness of his kind, eternal tenderness, and the blur of one who has looked much into a far distance. Suddenly he bent over and placed the man's hand over the girl's.
The last wall was down! Jerry buried his face in the white coverlet.