Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/187

 need so little. She did want you to stay; she has clung to that idea. I speak the simple truth, Mr. Robinson.'

'I don't know what to say to you—you are so extraordinarily good, so angelic,' Hyacinth replied, bewildered and made weak by a strange, unexpected shame. The episode he had just traversed, the splendour he had been living in and drinking so deep of, the unnatural alliance to which he had given himself up while his wretched little foster-mother struggled alone with her death-stroke—he could see it was that; the presentiment of it, the last stiff horror, was in all the place—the contrast seemed to cut him like a knife, and to make the horrible accident of his absence a perversity of his own. 'I can never blame you, when you are so kind, but I wish to God I had known!' he broke out.

Lady Aurora clasped her hands, begging him to judge her fairly. 'Of course it was a great responsibility for us, but we thought it right to consider what she urged upon us. She went back to it constantly, that your visit should not be cut short. When you should come of yourself, it would be time enough. I don't know exactly where you have been, but she said it was such a pleasant house. She kept repeating that it would do you so much good.'

Hyacinth felt his eyes filling with tears. 'She's dying—she's dying! How can she live when she's like that?'

He sank upon the old yellow sofa, the sofa of his lifetime and of so many years before, and buried his head on the shabby, tattered arm. A succession of sobs broke from his lips—sobs in which the accumulated emotion of months and the strange, acute conflict of feeling that had possessed him for the three weeks just past found relief