He did rise—and she presently felt his hand on her shoulder, and heard strange, unexpected words of tenderness from his lips.
“Dear—I love you—but what can I do? You are another man’s wife.”
She turned her whole body round, and caught his arm to her, and hid her face on his sleeve.
“Yes, I know, but can you ever forgive me—for the lies I have told you? That is what I want to know.”
“I have said that I loved you,” he said, simply. “I can’t say more than that. Women are different, I suppose.”
She never remembered anything sadder than the sigh with which he said this. She realized that in order to exonerate the woman he said he cared for, and to condone her fault, he had been obliged to involve the whole of her sex in her disgrace, and to set all womankind a few degrees lower.
“What am I to do then?” she asked like a child, sitting up, and pushing the disordered hair off her brows without regard to order or becomingness.
“Obviously,” he said, and his tone was almost brutal, “go, unless you will let me? Only, as you have a home and a husband to go to——”
“You might have spared me that!” she said, with a flash of her old spirit, rising, and wandering deviously towards the door, like one in a sad and hopeless dream. “Of course I must go!” she said meekly, fumbling with the door handle. “Will you please open it? I have things to do ... give up my room ... pay my bill....”
“Have you—are you sure you have enough money?”