“Talk all you want,” he answered with immense gentleness. “I’m here.”
“I can’t understand it even now, but he would not see me,” she broke out. “I was half mad. I wrote, and he would not answer. I went to his chambers when I heard he was going to leave England. I went to beg him to take me with him, married or unmarried. I would have gone on my knees to him. He was gone! Oh, why? Why?”
“You didn’t think he’d gone because he didn’t love you?” he asked her quite literally and unsentimentally. “You knew better than that?”
“How could I be sure of anything? When he left the room that awful night he would not look at me! He would not look at me!”
“Since I’ve been here I’ve been reading a lot of novels, and I’ve found out a lot of things about fellows that are not the common, practical kind. Now, he wasn’t. He’d lived pretty much like a fellow in a novel, I guess. What’s struck me about that sort is that they think they have to make noble sacrifices, and they’ll just walk all over a woman because they won’t do anything to hurt her. There’s not a bit of sense in it, but that was what he was doing. He believed he was doing the square thing by you, and you may bet your life it hurt him like hell. I beg your pardon; but that’s the word—just plain hell.”
“I was only a girl. He was like iron. He went away alone. He was killed, and when he was dead the truth was told.”
“That’s what I’ve remembered,” he said quite slowly, “every time I’ve looked at you. By gee! I’d have stood anything from a woman that had suffered as much as that.”
It made her cry, his genuineness, and she did not care in the least that the tears streamed down her cheeks. How he had stood things! How he had borne, in that odd, unimpressive way, insolence and arrogance for which she ought to have been blackballed by decent society! She could scarcely bear it.
“Oh! to think it should have been you,” she wept, “just you who understood!”
“Well,” he answered speculatively, “I mightn’t have understood as well if it hadn’t been for Ann. By jinks! I used to lie awake at night sometimes, thinking, ‘Supposing it had been Ann and me!’ That’s why I understood.”