Her eyes, full of tears, met his. “You ask for something that’s gone,” she said, miserably. “Dead roses are always dead roses. Not all our tears will make them fresh again.”
There was a long silence. Presently he rose and began to walk up and down the room.
“Why did you come back?” he asked at last, sharp pain in his voice.
She got up and went to him.
“I thought you wanted me.”
“Not if you no longer care.” His lips trembled.
She put both hands on his arm, and drew him to her.
“Robin, dear,” she whispered, “listen! There are different sorts of love. It’s true—I can’t deny it—that I don’t feel in the old way,—in the way I did when—when we first married. But all the same you are more to me than any man in the world. Your troubles are my troubles. I hate you to be unhappy. When Rose told me how ill you looked, I wanted to fly all the way home, to look after you.” She thought suddenly of the letter she had read in the hotel bedroom, and was thankful to feel that she was speaking truth. “All that part of my love has never failed. Do you know, Robin, when one has loved very much, I believe one spins a sort of web, made up of a thousand, thousand threads, binding one to the loved person? They are very slight, but very strong. We can’t break them. I can’t break the threads I spun round you. I have tried, but I can’t. Oh, Robin, don’t say I oughtn’t to have come back!”
He laid his head on her breast with a touchingly helpless gesture.
“If you hadn’t come back I should have died,” he said. “I don’t deserve anything, Cecily. But, oh, my dear, give me—as much—as you can.”