Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/192

178 sense and the need of each other. These things had now the beauty of all the tenderness that they had never spoken and that, for some time, even as they clung there, was too strange and too deep for speech. But what was extraordinary was that as Jean disengaged herself there was neither wonder nor fear between them; nothing but a recognition in which everything swam and, on the girl's part, the still higher tide of the remorse that harried her and that, to see him, had made her break away from the others. "They tell me I'm ill, I'm insane," she went on—"they want to shut me up, to give me things—they tell me to lie down, to try to sleep. But it's all to me, so dreadfully, as if it were I who had done it, that when they admitted to me that you were here I felt that if I didn't see you it would make me as crazy as they say. It's to have seen her go—to have seen her go: that's what I can't bear—it's too horrible!" She continued to sob; she stood there before him swayed to and fro in her grief. She stirred up his own, and that added to her pain; for a minute, in their separate sorrow, they moved asunder like creatures too stricken to communicate. But they were quickly face to face again, more intimate, with