Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/540

Rh trembling under her. “But you wrote it—you wrote it! I thought you meant it!” she cried, as the book spun across a table and dropped to the ﬂoor.

He looked at her coldly, almost apprehensively, as if she had grown suddenly dangerous and remote; then he turned and walked out of the room.

The striking of the clock roused her. She rose to her feet, rang the bell, and told the maid, through the door, that she had a headache, and was unable to see Miss Cicely. Then she turned back into the room, and darkness closed on her. She was not the kind to take grief passively—it drove her in anguished pacings up and down the ﬂoor. She walked and walked till her legs ﬂagged under her; then she dropped stupidly into the chair where Amherst had sat.…

All her world had crumbled about her. It was as if some law of mental gravity had been mysteriously suspended, and every ﬁrmly-anchored conviction, every accepted process of reasoning, spun disconnectedly through space. Amherst had not understood her—worse still, he had judged her as the world might judge her! The core of her misery was there. With terrible clearness she saw the suspicion that had crossed his mind—the suspicion that she had kept silence in the beginning because she loved him, and feared to lose him if she spoke. [ 524 ]