Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/156

142 her question, a face blanched by the change in her own. "For what did you come back to me?—for what did you come back?"

He gaped at her; then as if there were help for him in the simple fact that on his own side he could immediately recall, he stammered out: "To you—to you? I hadn't the slightest notion you were here!"

"Didn't you come to see where I was? Didn't you come absolutely and publicly for me?" He jerked round again to the window with the vague, wild gesture of a man in horrible pain, and she went on without vehemence, but with clear, deep intensity: "It was exactly when you found I was here that you did come back. You had a perfect chance, on learning it, not to show; but you didn't take the chance, you quickly put it aside. You reflected, you decided, you insisted we should meet." Her voice, as if in harmony with the power of her plea, dropped to a vibration more muffled, a soft but inexorable pressure. "I hadn't called you, I hadn't troubled you, I left you as perfectly alone as I've been alone. It was your own passion and your own act—you've dropped upon me, you've