Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/206

 In one of those cars, their small windows partly occluded with clothing, their sills littered with jars and bottles, Kay must have spent her wedding night. To his sense of injury was added this insult to his fastidiousness. When she finally came in he was almost startled to find her unchanged, save for her pallor and the deep circles under her eyes.

Neither of them spoke at once, but Herbert was quick to realize that what was a critical meeting for him was to her merely an unimportant incident in a tragic day. There was a curious blankness in her eyes; it struck him later that she had looked at him much as he had looked at the flying landscape that day. And because that first silence and absorption of hers was too painful, he hurried to speak.

"How is he now?"

"Better, they think. But he is suffering; they say" She put her handkerchief to her lips to steady them. "They say he will live, but he won't be able to ride again. His leg is badly broken. He doesn't know that, of course."

"Still, if he is going to live"

"Yes, of course." She came further into the room, and seemed really to see him for the first time.

"I'm sorry, Herbert. Sorry I've hurt you all. I suppose you don't believe that."

"I believe it," he said carefully, "but that doesn't matter now, does it? The point is, are you sorry for yourself, Kay?"

She shook her head.

"It was not just an impulse, then?"

"Yes, at the last. But it had to be, Herbert. It was stronger than I was. I even think"

"Yes?"

"I don't want to hurt you again."

"I haven't many rights, but I have a right to the truth about this."

"I even think that if we had been married, you and I, and Tom had asked me to go with him, I would have gone just the same."

That shocked him profoundly. It stripped the situation of all the careful disguises he had erected, and reduced it