"Is there any hope of my getting Sheila back?" he said, looking up at last. There was a vague and bewildered look in his eyes. He seemed incapable of thinking of anything but that.
"I don't know," said Ingram. "But one thing is certain: you will never get her back to repeat the experiment that has just ended in this desperate way."
"I should not ask that," he said hurriedly—"I should not ask that at all. If I could but see her for a moment, I would ask her to tell me everything she wanted, everything she demanded as conditions, and I would obey her. I will promise to do everything that she wishes."
"If you saw her you could give her nothing but promises," said Ingram. "Now, what if you were to try to do what you know she wishes, and then go to her?"
"You mean—" said Lavender, glancing up with another startled look on his face. "You don't mean that I am to remain away from her a long time—go into banishment as it were—and then some day come back to Sheila and beg her to forget all that happened long before?"
"I mean something very like that," said Ingram with composure. "I don't know that it would be successful. I have no means of ascertaining what Sheila would think of such a project—whether she would think that she could ever live with you again."
Lavender seemed fairly stunned by the possibility of Sheila's resolving never to see him again; and began to recall what Ingram had many a time said about the strength of purpose she could show when occasion needed.
"If her faith in you is wholly destroyed, your case is hopeless. A woman may cling to her belief in a man through good report and evil report, but if she once loses it she never recovers it. But there is this hope for you: I know very well that Sheila had a much more accurate notion of you than ever you had of her; and I happen to know, also, that at the very time when you were most deeply distressing her here in London she held the firm conviction that your conduct toward her—your habits, your very self—would alter if you could only be persuaded to get out of the life you have been leading. That was true, at least, up to the time of your leaving Brighton. She believed in you then. She believed that if you were to cut society altogether, and go and live a useful and hardworking life somewhere, you would soon become once more the man she fell in love with up in Lewis. Perhaps she was mistaken: I don't say anything about it myself."
The terribly cool way in which Ingram talked—separating, defining, exhibiting, so that he and his companion should get as near as possible to what he believed to be the truth of the situation—was oddly in contrast with the blind and passionate yearning of the other for some glimpse of hope. His whole nature seemed to go out in a cry to Sheila that she would come back and give him a chance of atoning for the past. At length he rose. He looked strangely haggard, and his eyes scarcely seemed to see the things around him. "I must go home," he said.
Ingram saw that he merely wanted to get outside and walk about in order to find some relief from this anxiety and unrest, and said, "You ought, I think, to stop here and go to bed. But if you would rather go home, I will walk up with you if you like."