Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/243

Rh would make him suffer? Well enough he knew indeed that he should never have it from the only person who, to-day, could give it to him. She let him press her with his sombre eyes, only smiling at him with an exquisite mercy and breathing equally little the word that would expose her secret and the word that would appear to deny his literal right to bitterness. She told nothing, she judged nothing; she accepted every thing but the possibility of her return to the old symbols. Stransom divined that for her, too, they had been vividly individual, had stood for particular hours or particular attributes—particular links in her chain. He made it clear to himself, as he believed, that his difficulty lay in the fact that the very nature of the plea for his faithless friend constituted a prohibition; that it happened to have come from her was precisely the vice that attached to it. To the voice of impersonal generosity he felt sure he would have listened; he would have deferred to an advocate who, speaking from abstract justice, knowing of his omission, without having known Hague, should have had the imagination to say: "Oh, remember only the best of him; pity him; provide for him!" To provide for him on the very ground of having discovered another of his turpitudes was not to pity him, but to glorify him. The more Stransom thought, the more he made it out that this relation of Hague's, whatever it was, could only have been a deception finely practised. Where had it come into the life