Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/347



T was done now. He had betrayed himself. The wall was down, and before them both there must have arisen once more the painful scene in the library under the malignant portrait of John Shane. (Lily, a young girl, smiling and saying, "I love you, I suppose, but not better than myself. I might have married you once. I cannot now, because I know." Julia Shane, so long dead now, leaning on her ebony stick, hard, unflinching, in the face of everything. "You see, I can do nothing. There is too much of her father in her.")

It stood before them now, the crisis of two lives, naked, stripped of all forgetfulness. The Governor, his face scarlet and apoplectic, remained silent, unable to speak. Lily said softly, "I'm sorry . . . I'm sorry. I should never have mentioned it. I did not guess it would pain you so."

The new gentleness, the new sympathy revealed itself for the first time in all their talk together. It showed in her dark, lustrous eyes. There could be no doubt of it. She was no longer mocking. She was sorry for the lover; grown old, confused now by the memory of a youthful, overwhelming passion. She even touched his hand gently.

"It does not matter now," she said. "After all, it was simply a part of life. I'm not sorry, myself . . . and the world would say that it was I who suffered most. I didn't suffer . . . Believe me, I didn't suffer." She smiled. "Besides what could regrets possibly accomplish? It is the future in which one must live . . . not the past. The longer I live the more certain I am of that."

Still he remained silent. He had become humble, subdued, wilted before the memory of something which had happened more than twenty years before. She must have guessed then, for the first time, what in the unwitting cruelty of her youth