Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/194

180 Jean flung herself down and hid her face; her smothered wild lament filled the room.

Tony stopped before her, seeing everything she brought up, but only the more helpless in his pity. "It was the only little minute in all the years that you had been forced to fail her. She was always more yours than mine."

Jean could only look out through her storm-beaten window. "It was just because she was yours that she was mine. It was because she was yours from the first hour that I!" She broke down again; she tried to hold herself; she got up. "What could I do, you see? To you I couldn't be kind." She was as exposed in her young, pure woe as a bride might have been in her joy.

Tony looked as if he were retracing the saddest story on earth. "I don't see how you could have been kinder."

She wondered with her blinded eyes. "That wasn't what thought I was—it couldn't be, ever, ever. Didn't I try not to think of you? But the child was a beautiful part of you—the child I could take and keep. I could take her altogether, without thinking or remembering. It was the only thing I