"Some day--I'll tell you," she said, brokenly.
"Yes, you shall tell me. It would help us both."
"I'll prove to you he wasn't vile. When--when he proposed that to me he was distracted. So was I. How could he break off his engagement? Now you see how she loved him. But we couldn't part--we couldn't say good-bye. It had all come on us unawares. We wanted to belong to each other--just for two days--and then part forever. Oh, I'll tell you--"
"You shall tell me all--here!" he said, firmly, crushing her delicate hands in his own against his breast, so that she felt the beating of his heart.
"Give me my hand. I'll show you his letter--his last letter to me." And, trembling, she drew from under her pillow that last scrawled letter, written from the squalid hotel near the Gare de Sceaux.
No sooner, however, had she placed it in Delafield's hands than she was conscious of new forces of feeling in herself which robbed the act of its simplicity. She had meant to plead her lover's cause and her own with the friend who was nominally her husband. Her action had been a cry for sympathy, as from one soul to another.
But as Delafield took the letter and began to read, her pulses began to flutter strangely. She recalled the phrases of passion which the letter contained. She became conscious of new fears, new compunctions.
For Delafield, too, the moment was one of almost intolerable complexity. This tender intimacy of night--the natural intimacy of husband and wife; this sense, which would not be denied, however sternly he might hold it in check, of her dear form beside him; the little refinements and self-revelations of a woman's room; his half-rights towards her, appealing at once to love, and to the memory of that solemn pledge by which he had won her--what man who deserved the name but must be conscious, tempestuously conscious, of such thoughts and facts?
And then, wrestling with these smarts, these impulses, belonging to the natural, physical life, the powers of the moral being--compassion, self-mastery, generosity; while strengthening and directing all, the man of faith was poignantly aware of the austere and tender voices of religion.
Amid this play of influences he read the letter, still kneeling beside her and holding her fingers clasped in his. She had closed her eyes and lay still, save for the occasional tremulous movement of her free hand, which dried the tears on her cheek.