Haldane was fast losing control of himself. With an effort he pulled himself together and tried to smile.
“You’re right to go,” he said. “Right. You wouldn’t want anything to do with me now.”
He looked up at her, though loath to meet her eyes. There was a wonderful pity in her face. “Don’t!” he cried, sharply, not understanding.
“I want to say this,” he broke out again, almost roughly. “I never guessed that she knew how I felt toward her. I wasn’t cruel or beastly—I was kind. They say that’s cruelty, too. I tried—my God! how I tried!—never to let her know the truth. That’s all I can say for myself; ... you’d better go.”
She was so silent that at last he faced her again. She was crying softly, and, it appeared, without bitterness. Haldane stared at her curiously.
“I wanted to know that—that last you said,” Mrs. Locke gasped, with difficulty. “I—I—I’ve been thinking it all over in my room. It’s very hard to say—please let me go on with it just as I can, I—I’ve said I wanted to hear that last. But I knew it—in my heart—all the time. I knew you couldn’t be cruel to a living thing. And—and—somehow—it changed—things. I’ve had such a terrible struggle all alone. I’ve tried to pray over it and—oh, I’m afraid I’m very wrong and very wicked—I almost know I am.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “But—oh, Leonard ... somehow I just seemed to feel inside me just how you felt, just how—it was with you those two years. Oh, it’s a dreadful thing to say, isn’t it? Poor Ida! She was so good to me, and yet sometimes—” The trembling old woman’s voice faltered and broke.
Haldane’s eyes were full of tears. A great light was slowly breaking for him. He dared not speak.
“Don’t think I’m a wicked old woman, Leonard; I never even guessed—till I came here—how I felt. And then you were like a son—my son—the boy I wanted so, and—I loved the music so, and being with you, more than anything I ever knew—it doesn’t seem as if—”
Haldane put his hand on hers gently, “As if you could go away now?”
She turned to him with a little sad smile, and in her face was a sweet dignity.