"I've told you, because I think the thought of it may restrain you when nothing else will."
"I see. You mean to say, you believe I killed her?"
Anne closed her eyes.
CHAPTER XXXVI
He did not know whether he believed what she had said, nor whether she believed it herself, neither could he understand her motive in saying it.
At intervals he was profoundly sorry for her. Pity for her loosened, from time to time, the grip of his own pain. He told himself that she must have gone through intolerable days and nights of misery before she could bring herself to say a thing like that. Her grief excused her. But he knew that, if he had been in her place, she in his, he the saint and she the sinner, and that, if he had known her through her sin to be responsible for the child's death, there was no misery on earth that could have made him charge her with it.
Further than that he could not understand her. The suddenness and cruelty of the blow had brutalised his imagination.
He got up and stretched himself, to shake off the oppression that weighed on him like an unwholesome sleep. As he rose he felt a queer feeling in his head, a giddiness, a sense of obstruction in his brain. He went into the dining-room, and poured himself out a small quantity of whiskey, measuring it with the accuracy of abstemious habit. The dose had become necessary since his nerves had been unhinged by worry and the shock of Peggy's death. This time he drank it almost undiluted.
He felt better. The stimulant had jogged something in his brain and cleared it.