Clare’s eyes, when she turned them on him, were narrowed with pain.
“Richard, must you ask me questions now? I have come back to you; I ask you only to leave me to myself.”
But that was precisely what he could not do.
“You ask a good deal, don’t you, in asking that? I see you white and shaken, yet I am not to know the cause. You ask a good deal of my forbearance, indeed. I am not to know what messages another man sends you. I am not to know what is going on, nearly under my nose, but kept away from me. I am to be defied by my wife, and then kept in ignorance by her. This is the state of affairs we have come to in one short morning! What has happened to us? it bewilders me.... I insist upon knowing,—I will know,—has that half-wit come to you with a message from his brother?”
“No,” said Clare.
“How you have to force even that one monosyllable from your lips! What, he came on his own initiative? Clare, you are not speaking the truth.—Yes, I am sure you are; I beg your pardon. You distract me by your coldness. Clare, forgive me, I scarcely knew what I was saying.”
“Don’t touch me,” said Clare, recoiling, “for pity’s sake don’t touch me now.”
“I am a very unhappy man,” said Calladine, falling again into his chair and taking his head between his hands. “I am indeed an unhappy man,—what am I to do with my life?”
He remained for some time with his head sunk between his hands, then, glancing up to see what effect his attitude might have had upon Clare, he found her gazing out of the window.
“I see,—you forget my very presence,” he said reproachfully, and his sense of injury was doubled. But because his distress was genuine, although he could not refrain from rhetoric, he followed her across the room in a tormented way, and tried to see into her face. “Clare, speak to me; I am not angry, only unhappy. There is something now in your mind which I do not share; you live in a half-hour which is secret from me.—Or have you always,” he cried suddenly, “lived in hours I knew nothing of?”