“I smuggled it in,” she confessed, “I knew your old servant—she used to be with us. The others—from Dr Drummond’s—have been there all day making it warm and comfortable for you. I had no right to do anything like that, but I had the right, hadn’t I, to bring the rose?”
“I don’t know,” he answered her, hard-pressed, “how we are to bear this.”
She shrank away from him a little, as if at a glimpse of a surgeon’s knife.
“We are not to bear it,” she said eagerly. “The rose is to tell you that. I didn’t mean it, when I left it, to be anything more—more than a rose; but now I do. I didn’t even know when I came out tonight. But now I do. We aren’t to bear it, Hugh. I don’t want it so—now. I can’t—can’t have it so.”
She came nearer to him again and caught with her two hands the lapels of his coat. He closed his own over them and looked down at her in that half-detachment, which still claimed and held her.
“Advena,” he whispered, out of the sudden clamour in his mind, “she can’t be—she isn’t—nothing has happened to her?”
She smiled faintly, but her eyes were again full of fear at his implication of the only way.
“Oh, no!” she said. “But you have been away, and she has come. I have seen her; and oh! she won’t care, Hugh—she won’t care.”
Her asking, straining face seemed to gather and reflect all the light there was in the shifting night about them. The rain had stopped, but the wind still hurtled past, whirling the leaves from one darkness to another. They were as isolated, as outlawed there in the wild wet wind as they were in the confusion of their own souls.
“We must care,” he said helplessly, clinging to the sound and form of the words.