“It isn’t only that,” interrupted Rose, stemming his torrent of words.
“What, then?”
She lay back in her chair, and her eyes travelled to the blue sky, and to the tall shaft of the campanile. “All sorts of things,” she answered, slowly. “What an abominably penetrating book the Bible is, when one doesn’t read it too often,” she added, after a moment, with apparent irrelevance. “‘The heart is deceitful above all things’—Robert has discovered that, if I mistake not.”
Mayne was silent.
“I believe he used to think himself rather a noble fellow at one time,” she went on, “with his higher love and so forth—whatever that may mean.”
Mayne uttered a contemptuous exclamation. “Well?” he demanded, “but how does that illustrate my case?”
“You talk about Cecily’s friendship,” she returned, “but aren’t you, unconsciously, perhaps, relying a little, just a very little, on that patience from which you hoped so much before she married?”
Mayne said nothing. He had seated himself once more in the arm-chair, and Rose was aware of the rigidity of his attitude. It was as though his body had become suddenly frozen.
She went on, not quite steadily. “You hate me for saying it, of course. So should I, if I were you. But, Dick—you and I are not by nature self-deceivers. We think straight. And when one person loves, even though the other does not, is it quite safe? There comes a weak moment—a sense of the dreariness of life—gratitude on one side; on the other a strong emotion. Oh, Dick, you know as well as I do.”
Mayne raised himself slowly, and bent towards her. When he began to speak it was slowly, also, as though he were feeling for the words.