'Gave!' she repeats, her voice dropping again to a husky whisper, and casting her parched eyes up to heaven, as if calling on the stilly constellations to be witness to her great woe—'gave! He himself said gave! And I am alive after hearing it. Oh, poor I!'
Her voice shudders away in a sigh of intense self-pity; and she hurriedly covers her face with her hands as if to shut out the view of her own fate, as too hideous to be looked upon with sanity; while long, dry sobs shake her from head to foot. The sight of her anguish is more than Talbot can bear. Two steps bring him to her side; and before he can realise what he is doing, he has taken her two hands and drawn them forcibly away from her face.
'Betty!'
'Well!' she says dully, leaving them in his, as if it no longer mattered where, or in whose keeping, they lay; 'what about Betty?'
'Betty!' convulsively pressing her small, burning fingers, 'you break my heart!'
'I wish I could!' rejoins she fiercely. 'I wish to heavens I could! But I must leave that to her. Tell me about her!' changing her tone to one of factitious temperate interest. 'She is a good soul, I am told; bonne comme du pain. There is nothing so pleasant as complete change, is there? How does she show her goodness, by the bye? Does she say her prayers every night, and make a flannel petticoat for the poor every day, eh?'
He attempts no answer to her gibes; only, in his intense and mistakenly shown compassion, he still holds her hands, and looks down, with a pity beyond speech's plummet-line to sound, into the eyes whose beauty he has long ceased to see, but whose agony has still power to stab him.
'I suppose,' she goes on, her mood changing—it is never the same for two minutes together, and her mockery giving way to a tone of condensed resentful wretchedness—'that if I loved you properly, as people love in books, I should be glad to see you march off triumphantly, with drums beating and colours flying, to be happy ever after; but I am not! I tell you fairly I am not! If I had my will you should be as miserable—no, that you never could be; I would let you off with less than that—as I am!'
He looks at her sadly.
'Even if I were so happy as you fear, a couple of hours ago, I think you have cured me of it.'