Then she broke down; that's to say, she lowered her flags. Her head sank to her breast; her eyes stared at the stone path; their lids reddened and swelled with the springing of tears that would not fall.
"Didn't you know?" I said.
"I suppose I must have known—once."
Up till this moment she had not said one word, she had not made one sign, that had really given her away. And nothing could have given her away more completely than the thing she had said now. She had confessed to a passion so dominating and so blind as to be unaware of anything but itself. It was not so much that it had swept before it all the codes and traditions she had been brought up in—codes and traditions might well have been nothing to Viola—it had struck at her strongest affection and her memory. She adored her brother. He was sailing for India next week; she must have known it; and she had forgotten it.
Her confession was not made to me (she had forgotten my existence utterly); it was made to herself—the old self that had adored Reggie; that at this evocation of him arose and sat in judgment on the strange, perverted, monstrous self that could forget him. I've called it a confession; but it wasn't a confession. It was a cry, a muttering, rather, of secret, agonized discovery.
"He wants to see you before he goes," I said.
Her eyelids spilled their tears at that; but only those they had gathered; no more came. Her self-control was admirable.
"It's all right," I said. "You've heaps of time. I'm going to take you to
Ostend in the morning. You'll be in Canterbury to-morrow night."
"Is that what you came for?"
"Yes."