“Why did you make me go, Julian?” she said. “I knew I should only shock them. I can’t ever put up with that languid ignorant curiosity.”
“I think it will do them good to be shocked,” he said, with a smile. “Give them something to think of beside their ailments. And I had a special reason,” he went on with a deeper note of tenderness in his voice—“I do not wish you to shut yourself away as you have been doing. You will grow morbid and dissatisfied with life. I want you to take a healthy interest in it once again.”
She had thrown herself on a low cushioned lounge before the bright wood fire. He took a chair beside her. She seemed to lapse into profound thought, and he watched her beautiful grave face with adoring eyes.
“I wish,” she said suddenly, “one could live a free, simple, uncriticised life. Do you remember the old days among the wild hills? The cool grey dawns... the sharp sweet air... the long gallops over the rough roads by the rice fields... the strange temples... the songs of the snake-charmers? Ah, we were happy then, Julian, happier than we ever realised.”
“May we not be still happier?” he said earnestly. “Life has a graver and a wider meaning, it is true, but that should only give us a deeper power of appreciation.”
A strange smile touched her lips; a smile of mystery, and of dreamy, unfathomable regret.
“We shall never be happier,” she said, “than we were then. I have always felt that... yes, I know what you would ask. Did I love you then? Yes, Julian, with all my heart and soul... and yet—and yet—I could have been nothing more to you than a sister, a friend. There was a purpose in my marriage.”
She ceased speaking. For a moment her eyes closed, her head sank back wearily on the soft cushions.
Presently she opened them, and met his anxious gaze. “No, I did not faint,” she said. “But, why I know not, that sense of blankness and dizziness always comes over me when I speak on that subject. There is something I wish, yet dread, to remember—but, just as I am on the point of grasping it, there is a blank.”
“Do not speak of that time,” he said passionately. “I hate to think you were the wife of that man—it was sacrilege... you—my pure-souled goddess.”