“You quite misunderstand me,” she retorted, with a good infusion of the wonted sharpness in her tone. “Bonnybell is no longer a stranger to either you or me, and it is a farce to pretend that she is; and I have not the least intention of leading an invalid life. I hope to do a good deal of work yet, to go on working, if possible, nearly to the end.”
He had heartily hailed the surliness of her voice, as something normal and healthy, but he left her free from interruption to explain the idea which he had failed to comprehend. It was a minute or two before she did so.
“I think,” she said, the pettishness of eye and tone giving place to a deep solemnity, “that if these are to be the final months of my life, I ought to try and keep them as free as possible from unnecessary temptations to irritability and anger; from profitless friction to a temper which through all these years I have failed—as you know, to your cost—to bring under proper control.”
Courteous as he was by nature and training, it did not occur to Edward to utter a polite contradiction of a statement whose truth was so painfully well known to them both. He only made a slight gesture that might mean assent.
“My motive, as I have stated it, sounds wholly selfish; but it is not so”—her voice sank slightly—“for you, too, it is better that she should go.”
At that he turned white. “Of what do you suspect me?”
“Of what do I suspect you?” she repeated, looking at him with a remorseful kindness. “Of nothing worse than of wishing to put a little colour into the life I have made so grey for you.”
There was none of the satiric bitterness with which she often alluded to the failure in the matter of happiness of their joint life voyage, only pitying pain; and only pitying pain, in full measure, rang in the remonstrance of his reply.
“Do not you think that you have made it greyer by always taking for granted that it must be grey?”
She assented almost gently. “It is possible. Since the great initial mistake, I have gone from one error of judgment to another, and I am not sure”—with an accent of humiliation—“that though I did it for the best, though I thought I saw the path of duty plain before me, that the last has not been the gravest of all.”