“You were!––you are!” she broke in. “This is all a mistake––a cruel, hideous mistake!”
“I tried to go,” he went on unflinchingly. “You urged me to stay. I was weak. I could not force myself to leave you.”
“Because––because!” she murmured.
“All the more reason why I should have gone,” he replied. “But I was weak, unfit. I lied to you and won your pity. You gave me the chance to stay and prove myself what I am. Down there, when he told me what I should have guessed––what I must have guessed had not my own baseness blinded me to the truth––when he told me he was your brother, I saw myself, my real self,––my shriveled, black, hellish soul. Now you see why I must go down again. I can 361 never make reparation for what I have done. But I can at least go down to him.”
“You take all the blame on yourself!” she protested. “What if I had confessed my secret, there at the first, when Tom sprang down from the car and I knew him.”
“If you had told, then I should not have been tempted to doubt you, and I should have gone on, it might have been forever, with that lie and that theft between us––and I should not have been forced to see, as I now see, my absolute unworthiness of you.”
“Of me!” she cried shrilly, and she burst into wild hysterical laughter. It broke off as abruptly as it began. “Unworthy of me––of me? the daughter of a drunken mother, the sister of a girl who––” A sob choked her. She went on desperately: “You have told me all. But I––do you not wonder why I kept silent––why I denied Mary by my silence? You say you sought to harm Tom––down there. You did not know he was my brother. You thought he would harm me. Is it not so?”
“I doubted you!”
“Why? Because I failed to tell the truth. I feared to hurt him––to make trouble between him and his rich, high-bred wife. As if I should not have known better the moment I saw Genevieve! Dear sister! she knows all. But you––Either I should have spoken, or I should have hidden all my fondness for 362 him. But I could not hide my love for him––and I was ashamed to tell.”
“Ashamed––you?”