“Because I’ve found you in affliction and I’m a Christian woman.”
Neither of them understood the other. He said suddenly with a flash of the old fire:
“Will you swear you’ll never tell your mistress where I am?”
A faint light flickered in her pale eyes. “I’ll swear if you like. But haven’t you taken in what I’ve been telling you all the time?”
“So long as we can trust each other—that is all that matters.”
“You can trust me all right,” said Myra.
They talked the ground over again for a while longer. Then he grew tired with the strain, and the nurse put an end to the interview. But Myra came the next day and the day after that, and Triona grew to long for her visit. He became aware of a crabbed kindness in her attitude towards him side by side with her jealous love for Olivia. She was anxious for his welfare within grimly prescribed limitations. His immediate future concerned her. What did he purpose to do with his invalid-dom after his discharge from the hospital? He himself, at this stage, had no notion. He confided to her the despair of his active life. The motor-lorry had wrecked his hopes of salvation. He told her the whole Boronowski story. Myra nodded; but faithful to the part she had chosen, she said nothing of Boronowski’s letter to Major Olifant. Only by keeping the lives of the ill-fated pair in tightly sealed and non-communicable compartments, could she be true to an ethical code formulated by many definite sorrows and many vague, but none the less poignant, spiritual conflicts.
“It’s funny,” said he, “that you’re the only human being I should know in the world.”
Her intuition skipped the gap of demonstration of so extraordinary a pronouncement, and followed his flight into the Unknown.
“It might be luck for you,” she said.