She said nothing; for she was conscious now, conscious and ashamed of using a power that she had no right to have; ashamed, too, of being forced to acknowledge the truth of the thing she had so passionately denied.
"You needn't be afraid," he said. "Of course I am going to marry her."
He turned away from her as he had turned away five years ago, with the same hopeless sense of dishonour and defeat. She called him back, as she had called him back five years ago, and for the same purpose, of delivering a final stab. Only that this time she knew it was a stab; and her own heart felt the pain as she delivered it.
But the terrible thing had to be done. She had got to return the manuscript, the gift that should never have been given. She gathered the loosened sheets tenderly, like things that she was grieved to part from. He admitted that she was handling her sword with all gentleness so as to avoid as far as possible any suggestion of a thrust.
"You must take them back," she said. "I can't keep them—or—or have anything to do with them after what you told me. I should feel as if I'd taken what belonged to some one else."
As he took the sheets from her and pocketed them, she felt that again he was pocketing an insult as well as a stab.
But the victim was no longer an inexperienced youth. So he smiled valorously, as beseemed his manhood. "And yet," he murmured, "you say it isn't true."
She did not contradict him this time. And as he turned he heard behind him the closing of the door.