Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/557

Rh the other.…” She paused, and her voice regained its strength. “That is what I must face before you go: what you think, what you believe of me. You’ve never told me that.”

Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to his cheek—bones.

“Haven’t I told you by—by what I’ve done?” he said slowly.

“No—what you’ve done has covered up what you thought; and I’ve helped you cover it—I’m to blame too! But it was not for this that we … that we had that half—year together … not to sink into connivance and evasion! I don’t want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth from you, whatever it is.”

He stood motionless, staring moodily at the ﬂoor. “Don’t you see that’s my misery—that I don’t know myself?”

“You don’t know … what you think of me?”

“Good God, Justine, why do you try to strip life naked? I don’t know what’s been going on in me these last weeks "

“You must know what you think of my motive … for doing what I did.”

She saw in his face how he shrank from the least allusion to the act about which their torment revolved. But he forced himself to raise his head and look at her. “I have never—for one moment—questioned your [ 541 ]