“Because she loves you. You fool!” he exclaimed, “have n't I seen it? Has n't she all but told me so herself? And she has told you, in some sort of way, only you have made up your mind not to listen. Let me put matters plain before you. She says good-bye to you here in London, and goes home full of happiness and looks forward to your coming down invested in a new halo, and to your letters,—you know what sort of letters a man writes to the woman he loves,—and instead of all that you never go near her and you write her footling notes. What do you imagine she's thinking and feeling? What do you think any ordinary decent girl would think and feel in the circumstances?”
“Stella is n't an ordinary girl,” said John, leaning back in his writing-chair and looking at Herold from beneath his heavy brows.
“For that reason she thinks and feels a thousand times more acutely. She's ill, she's changed, she's the shadow of herself,” he went on fiercely, “and it's all through you.”
He broke off and, as John said nothing, he put both hands on the table and leaned over and looked into John's eyes.
“I 'll tell you another thing. The whole lot of us have caused her endless misery. We 've fed her all her life on lies. God knows how I hated them! Her coming out in the world has been a gradual discovery of them. She has had shock after shock. She has n't told me,—she's too proud,—but I know, I can read it in her face, in her eyes, in the tone of her voice. And now she's going through the biggest disillusion of all—you.”
“Do you mean,” said John, frowning heavily, “that she thinks I'm a blackguard because I seem—you put the phrase in my head by talking of the ordinary young woman—because I seem to have thrown her over?”
“She's wondering whether you are a lie, like most other things. And it's killing her.”
“What am I to do?”
“Tell her straight. You ought to have done so from the first.”
“If she feels it as deeply as you say, it might kill her outright.”