Page:Later Life (1919).djvu/276

268. But she was so calm and gentle, as she stood leaning against his table, that he found her incomprehensible and was only conscious of breathing again after that first moment when it had seemed to him that his throat, lungs, chest and heart were all gripped in one hideous constriction.

They were silent, she standing there and he looking at her, with his keen glance. A heat haze hung over the garden; the heavy summer scent floated up to them; from the kitchen came the monotonous voice of the housemaid droning out her love-song. And suddenly a sort of remorse loomed as a spectre before Constance, because she had fettered him to her life, for all his life, years ago; because she had fettered him to her then by accepting his sacrifice and that of his parents in her despair and helplessness, reviled outcast as she then was. It flashed before her: the recollection of that day when he came to her in Florence, when he made his gift of himself to her, made it despairingly, feeling even then perhaps, despite the forced love-illusion of passion, the life-long mistake which they were mutually making. She had accepted his gift, taken his youth; she had rendered him aimless, him and his life, his career and his happiness: all that he might perhaps yet have found. It flashed before her again: the recollection of that good-looking boy, the way he had come to her in Florence and the way she had taken everything, without having anything to give