Oh, if he would choose any other weapon of torture—any reviling, any accusation, any sneer, any reproach, anything but these questions that, terrible in their brevity, seem to lay her helpless soul even more naked before him than his lifelong habit of divining her, joined to who knows what added knowledge have already done.
“I had—I have no intention of breaking it!”
“I am quite”—“in the dark as to what you mean,” she would have added, but the superfluous lie dies unborn. “You meant to marry me—still?” Then she touches the depth of her degradation; hearing the anguish of an incredulity that is yet belief in her confession of such an intended treason against him pierce through his self-control.
“Did I quite deserve that?”
Her wretched head drops on her breast, and she stands at his mercy, attempting no further denial. But, as she has never in her life appealed to him in vain for help or sympathy, so, even now, the old habit is too strong for him.
“We must keep our heads clear!” he says, after a moment or two, in a voice that is no longer anguished or reproachful, but has regained its level of colourless quiet. “We must think it out. If we could stave off the marriage for a few weeks or months, I see a way out of the difficulty.”
Her lips are apart by reason of the shortness of her breath, but she forces them together to frame the two words—
“What way?”
His face, at whose unfamiliar rigidity her spirit has quailed, softens.
“I would not have told you so suddenly in any other case,” he says, with all his old gentle considerateness; “but now—at the pass we have arrived—it may come to you almost as a relief.”