“Yes, that’s all,” returned Easton, turning the pages absently over, and looking up and down the leaves.
Whatever had been her purposes, or hopes, or dreads, the moment had come from which she could not recoil, and in which she stood as absolutely unfriended as in the face of death. Everything had led to this at last; it might have been said that she was born for this alone, so supreme was it over all other fates and chances. If she had hoped for help from any source—from Easton’s possible suspicion, from the light in which she had tried to see what she had done with others’ eyes, from some confession of Gilbert’s in this letter of his—it was all in vain. Everything was remanded to her, and she was to make her choice, with none to urge or stay her. She sat and stared at the man who, she knew, would have given his life to defend her from others, but who was so powerless now to help her against herself. Of all the contending passions of her soul—shame, fear, resentment, and chiefly a frantic longing to discredit the reality of what was, and had been—a momentary scorn came uppermost.
“So!” she cried. “And that’s all he had to say!” She caught the letter from Easton’s hand, ran her eye swiftly over the closing page, and flung it back to him. “Yes, he was afraid to write it, two hundred miles away; he leaves it all to me. Well, then, I will tell you— Oh,” she broke off, “do you love me very, very much? Yes, I must tell you, for there is no one else, and, no matter what happens, you must know it.” She looked at him in an agony of terror and pity; she could not take her eyes from him while she spoke the words that now came. “He was in love with me; he said so the last moment I saw him; he was so from the first. It was that which made him quarrel with you, and it is that which makes him—he thinks I’ve told you—ask your pity now.”
In the ghastly silence that ensued, they found that they had both risen, and he stood with one hand resting against the trunk of the birch beneath which they had been sitting; Gilbert’s letter had fallen, and lay on the ground between them.
Easton made no answer, and tried to make none, standing in a hapless maze. The silence seemed interminable; but it was also intolerable; she recalled him to himself with a wild “Well!” Then he seemed to find his voice a great way off, and a husky murmur preceded his articulate speech.
“Have I kept you apart?” he asked. “Do you love him?”
“Love him? I loathe him!”
She shuddered to see the hope that rushed into his face, when he said, “Then I pity him with all my heart. How could he help loving you?”
She wrung her hands in despair. “Oh, why don’t you kill me, and spare me this. How can I tell you and make you understand? He never would have dared to speak to me if I had not— He never would have dared to speak if he had believed I loved you!”
“Do you love me?” he asked, as if he regarded nothing else but that, and he searched with his clear gaze the eyes which she was powerless to avert. She tried to speak, and could not. The shame, more cruel than any crime can bring, which a man feels in such a disillusion, crimsoned his pale visage, and his head fell upon his breast. Again the terrible silence held them both.