"Can't we save him?"
She shook her head. "Denis goes his own way. It's no use interfering."
"If you were to say something—"
Another slow shake. "He wouldn't listen. I've seen him like this once before, with a man he'd been good to, who cheated him. He was like a stone." She paused, and added, slowly, slowly, drop by drop distilling for Dorothea's comfort the essence of her meditations in the train: "I don't suppose it will go far. Denis isn't made that way. He will soon get tired of it." "If he wanted to go wrong, he wouldn't know the way!" She seemed to hear Gardiner's very accents. The acuteness of the pain took her by surprise—took away her breath and stopped her words. Dorothea gave a miserable little sob.
"'Soon get tired of it!' Oh, Lettice, Lettice, but when you think of what he was!"
To that Lettice made no reply; her face was grim. After a moment she exerted herself to finish her former speech, still half unwilling, for it took her heart long to forgive, though her head now acquitted Dorothea of the worst of her guilt, of a deliberate betrayal: "As a matter of fact, I don't believe there is anything wrong yet. I believe so far he is only playing with the idea. It may go no further. He has thirty years of habit to fight against." She did not say, "To-day will probably settle it, one way or the other," but the thought was in her mind.
Dorothea had sunk down on the rug in a miserable little heap, and was propping herself against the mantelpiece. "Oh, I have been bad, I have been bad," she said on a long quivering breath, twisting her hands together, while the tears came tumbling down her cheeks and into her lap. "Oh, it doesn't seem fair that a miserable little nobody like me should be allowed to do so much harm. Oh, if there is a God, why didn't he kill me when my baby died, and have done with it? To let me, me hurt a man like Denis—oh, I ought to have been squashed like a blackbeetle! And Mr. Gardiner too. Wherever I go I seem to bring nothing but trouble! Do lend me a hanky, Lettice, mine's all soppy."
"It's hardly worth while to think of Mr. Gardiner, is it?" suggested Lettice with faint irony. Dorothea raised her wet eyes.
"Why, of course I think of him, only I think of Denis more. It's everything with Denis, it was just because he wasn't like other men you couldn't help loving him. And now—now, even if he gets over it, as you say, it will never, never be the same." She stopped to swallow a sob. "But Mr. Gardiner—I know prison is horrid, and I'm sorry, oh! dreadfully sorry and ashamed whenever I think of him, but he'll come out at the end none the worse. Why, it isn't even as if it were a disgrace! You feel the same, Lettice, you know you do."