"What do you mean?"
"What I say. It is—it is intolerable—that I should ruin your life like this."
"Don't, please, exaggerate, Kitty! There is no question of ruin. I shall make my way when the time comes, and Lady Parham will have nothing to say to it!"
"No! Nothing will ever go well—while I'm there—like a millstone round your neck. William"—she came closer to him—"take my advice—do it! I Warned you when you married me. And now you see—it was true."
"You foolish child," he answered, slowly, "do you think I could forget you for an hour, wherever you were?"
"Oh yes," she said, steadily, "I know you would forget me—- if I wasn't here. I'm sure of it. You're very ambitious, William—more than you know. You'll soon care—"
"More for politics than for you? Another of your delusions, Kitty. Nothing of the sort. Moreover, if you will only let me advise you—trust your husband a little—think both for him and yourself. I see nothing either in politics or in our life together that cannot be retrieved."
He spoke with manly kindness and reasonableness. Not a trace of his habitual indolence or indifference. Kitty, listening, was conscious of the most tempestuous medley of feelings—love, remorse, shame, and a strange gnawing desolation. What else, what better could she have asked of him? And yet, as she looked at him, she thought suddenly of the moonlit garden at Grosville Park, and of that young, headlong chivalry with which he had thrown himself at her feet. This man before her, so much older and maturer, counting the cost of his marriage with her in the light of experience, and magnanimously, resolutely paying it—Kitty, in a flash, realized his personality as she had never yet done, his moral independence of her, his separateness as a human being. Her passionate self-love instinctively, unconsciously, had made of his life the appendage of hers. And now—? His devotion had never been so plain, so attested; and all the while bitter, terrifying voices rang upon the inner ear, voices of fate, vague and irrevocable.
She dropped into a chair beside his table, trembling and white.
"No, no," she said, drawing her handkerchief across her eyes, with a gesture of childish misery, "it's all been a—a horrid mistake. Your mother was quite right. Of course she hated your marrying me—and now—now she'll see what I've done. I guess perfectly what she's thinking about me to-day! And I can't help it—I shall go on—if you let me stay with you. There's a twist—a black drop in me. I'm not like other people."