“Yes, it’s ghastly,” she murmured from her heart.
“Joan,” her lover whispered, “in the secret book in which our lives are being written, you will appear as an angel and I as a cad. For that is how it has been for two years....” And Hugo Carr of the sombre eyes and the thin face that looked as though a fever lay behind it passed a hand across his eyes; and her arm crept up round his shoulder, and she held his face very near.
“Poor darling!” she whispered. “You’ve suffered frightfully, haven’t you?” And she did little things to comfort him.
“But you’ve suffered much more,” he whispered into her hair. He kissed her hair. “And I’ve let you—go on not hurting Ralph! And what good has it done? Ralph suspects me. I know he does. It’s difficult to explain....”
“But it will be all right now,” Joan soothed his wretchedness.
He turned her face to him and looked into her eyes, the grave eyes that looked as though she had left them on guard somewhere, watching something for her.
“So you do agree with me now, Joan?” he whispered gladly.
But she seemed to answer irrelevantly, with a peculiar little laugh she had, which stabbed his heart with a pleasure that was almost pain.
“To agree or to disagree—what does it matter to me, Hugo! Only you matter, sitting here. And I only matter because I am beside you. So let’s be silent a little while, thinking of each other....”
And she turned very wretched eyes on him.