"Don't you remember that day you came over to Shovelstrode and said, 'You will have to forgive me a great many things because I am so very hungry'?"
They had stopped again; the fields swelled round them, ghostly in the lemon twilight, and a wistful radiance glowed on Tony's face. He searched her eyes despairingly—he scarcely knew what for. The anger in them had died, and in its place was a beautiful serenity and kindliness. But that was not what he was looking for. His heart was full of hunger and tears, yet he did not hunger or cry for the woman who stood before him, but for the little girl he had known long months ago.
"Quentin used almost the same words as you did," she said, breaking the silence, "he told me how all his life he had been hungry, always craving for something good and pure and satisfying, never able to reach it. Then he met this girl, and he thought that he'd find in her all he was seeking. But he found only sorrow—sorrow for them both. He was in despair, in hell—and he believed I could help him out and make him a good man again. Don't you remember how you said that a man's only chance of rising out of the mud was for some woman to give him a hand and help him up?"
Nigel could not find words. A thick, misty horror was settling on him. Had those poor pleadings of his dying self then turned against him in his hour of need?
"There was Quentin asking for my help," continued Tony. "Oh, I know I'm no better than other girls, than the girl he used to love, but somehow I can't help feeling I'm the girl sent to help Quentin. When I told him he must go, he nearly went crazy ... his father said he was afraid he would kill himself ... and I—I was nearly mad too, for I—oh, God! I loved him."
A sounding contralto note swept into her voice; it seemed to swell up from her heart, from her heaving woman's breast on which her hands were folded.
"So I forgave him."
"Tony!..." cried Nigel faintly.
"Yes—I'm grateful to you. I'm afraid that when I saw you at Shovelstrode I was very stupid and stiff—I was a horrid little beast, and I couldn't forgive you for what was after all an honour you had done me. Now I see how much your friendship meant to me. But for you, Quentin and I might have been parted for ever."
A stupid rage was tearing Furlonger, and there was a mockery of laughter in it. He saw that his tragedy was after all only a farce—he was the time-honoured lover of farce, who with infinite pains makes a ladder to his lady's chamber, and then sees his rival swarm up it. There he stood, forlorn, discomfited, frustrated—but also intensely comic. Perhaps the student was right about Offenbach....