“Would it help you to see me as Clytie?” she asked.
“Yes, dearly,” he said.
“Then you can always come in to the studio when I am with Winifred, and I shall always be here on Sunday evenings. Don't you think I want to see you too—as Clytie!”
“Thank you. Thank you,” he said in a low voice, taking her hand. “Now it is time for us to go upstairs.”
CHAPTER XXII.
Each lay awake that night, thinking. To Clytie the revelation of Kent's love was dazing. The sense of her own dulness in never having pierced the heart of his mystery was even more confounding. Why should she have divined suddenly the meaning of the light in his eyes, on this first meeting after their eighteen months of separation, when she had been blind to it before? She only half guessed as yet why he had not told her, but she saw that it must have arisen from a rare, strange delicacy in his nature differentiating him from all other men that she had known. Her heart went out in pity for him.
“How he must have suffered!” she repeated over and over to herself. And then scenes between them came before her mind and became clear in the light of this revelation: the strange suppressed interview after her arrival from Durdleham; the last evening he had spent in London before going abroad, when he had lit her fire, and she had gone up to bid him farewell. How had her ears been so dull as not to detect the tremor in his voice when, after kissing her hand, he had said: “You are my very dear lady whom I will serve to the hour of my death”?
And then a little hissing snake of a thought formed itself into a reply; and she shrank up together with a slight convulsive shiver as if something foul had touched her.