Easton had sat silent under this torrent of bitterness. He now sprang to his feet.
“Stop!” he shouted. “You have got to take back every word—”
“Don’t be a fool, Easton!”
Easton ground his teeth. “You take a base advantage of what has passed between us; you rely on my forbearance to—”
“Oh! Passed between us!” sneered Gilbert. “Your forbearance! What do you think of the forbearance of a man who could lend himself to an infamous scoundrel’s revenge; who could consent to rise at his friend’s expense, and then live to boast of it to a woman?”
Easton choked. “What do you think,” he cried with equal outrage, “of a man who could urge me to do what I did, and always refuse to do or be anything that could cancel my regret, holding my consent in reproach over me through years of fraud and hypocrisy, to fling it in my face at last?”
Their friendship, honored and dear so long, was in the dust between them, and they trampled it under foot with the infernal hate that may have always lurked, a possible atrocity, in their hearts, silenced, darkened, put to shame by the perpetual kindness of their daily lives.
It remained for Gilbert, with all the insult he could wreak in the demand, to ask, “Is that Mrs. Farrell’s interpretation of my motives?” and then they were in the mood to kill, if they had been armed. But so much of the personal sanctity in which they had held each other remained instinctive with them that they could not inflict the final shame of blows.
They stood face to face in silence, and then Gilbert turned and walked slowly down toward the opening of the glen; Easton made a few mechanical paces after him. When Gilbert reached the border of the meadow he stopped and, with whatever motive, went swiftly back to the scene of their quarrel. He came in sight of the spot, but Easton was not to be seen there; he quickened his going almost to a run; and then he saw Easton lying at the brink of the pool. There was a slight cut along his temple, from which the blood ran curling into the clear basin, where it hung distinct, like a spire of smoke in crystal air.