Jim had meant to have made this relation in a tone of dispassionate narrative, but against his will and intention, as his memory recalls what seem to him the unworthy antics played by Byng's grief, his voice takes a sarcastic inflection. The horror written on his auditor's face as he utters the latest clause of his sentence recalls him to himself.
"Do not be afraid!" he says, in a tone which has no longer anything akin to a sneer in it, though it is not devoid of bitterness; "the impulse was a short-lived one; he is not thinking of putting an end to himself now, I can assure you of that; he is only thinking of how he can best amuse himself. Whether he is much more successful in that than he was in the former, I am not so sure."
Her eyes have dropped to her own fragile, ringless hands as they lie on her lap.
"Poor boy! poor boy!" she says over softly twice, moving her head up and down with a little compassionate movement.
At the pity expressed by her gesture, an unjust and unjustifiable hard anger takes harsh possession of him.
"It was a pity you let it go so far," he says austerely; "you must allow me to say that much; but I suppose, in point of fact, the ball once set rolling, it was past your power to stop it."
She listens to his philippic, with her head meekly bent.
"I did not try," she answers, in a half·whisper; then, after a pause, raising her down-dropped eyes, lit with a blue fire of excitement, almost inspiration, to his, "I said to myself, 'If I have any luck, I shall die before the smash comes;' and I just lived on from day to day. I had not the heart to stop it; I knew it would stop of itself before long; I had never—hardly ever"—correcting herself, as it seems, with a modifying afterthought—"in my life before known what happiness meant; and oh! oh! OH!"—with a groan of deepening intensity at each repeated interjection—"what a big word it is!"
Never—hardly ever—known what happiness meant before! Why, surely she was happy at the Moat! and before his mind's eye there rises an image of her in her riotous rosy gaiety; but even as it does, there flashes upon him a comprehension of her speech.
It is not the careless merriment of childhood to which she is alluding; it is to the happiness, par excellence, of life. If this is the case, why did she correct herself and modify her negative with a "hardly"? A jealous feeling of someone else—someone beside Byng; a jealousy none the less keen for being vague—for not knowing on what object it can lay hold—sharpens his tone as he repeats aloud, and with an accent of interrogation, her qualifying adverb: