Triona rose and put on his jacket which now was dry.
“How can I hope to make you understand, when I don’t understand myself? Besides,” he flashed, after shrugging himself impatiently into the garment, “haven’t I said I wasn’t seeking condonation or sympathy?”
“You asked me whether I thought you a scoundrel,” said Olifant quietly.
“Well, do you? Say I am, and have done with it.”
“If I did, I don’t see what good it would do,” replied Olifant, a vague comprehension of this imaginative alien soul dawning on his mind. “You’re out for penance in the same crazy way you’ve been out for everything else. So you hand me the scourge and tell me to lay on. But I won’t. Also—if I committed myself by calling you an unmitigated blackguard, I couldn’t give you the advice that it’s in my heart to give you.”
“And what’s that?”
“To go back to Olivia and do your penance with her by telling and living the truth. Magna est veritas et prævalebit. Especially with a woman who loves you.”
Triona turned to the table by the window and stared out into the rain-swept garden, and the vision of a girl horror-stricken, frozen, dead, rose before his eyes. Presently he said, his back to the room:
“You mean kindly and generously. But it’s impossible to go back. The man, Alexis Triona, whom she loved, has melted away. He never had real existence. In his place she sees a stranger, one John Briggs, whom she loathes like Hell—I’ve seen it in her eyes. She feels as if she had been contaminated by contact with some unclean beast.”
Olifant sprang from his chair and, catching him by the shoulder, swung him round.