Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/202

194 anything, of everything, any one else may say—on the perfectly solid ground of your having irretrievably done it. Don't talk to me,' Reeve went on, 'about your husband and new complications: to do that now is horribly unworthy of you and quite the sort of thing that adds—well, you know what—to injury. There isn't a single complication that there hasn't always been and that we haven't, on the whole, completely mastered and put in its place. There was nothing in your husband that prevented, from the first hour we met, your showing yourself, and every one else you chose, what you could do with me. What you could do you did systematically and without a scruple—without a pang of real compunction or a movement of real retreat.'

Mrs. Despard had not come down unprepared, and her impenetrable face now announced it. She was even strong enough to speak softly—not to meet anger with anger. Yet she was also clearly on her defence. 'If I was kind to you—if I had the frankness and confidence to let it be seen I liked you—it's because I thought I was safe.'

'Safe?' Barton Reeve echoed. 'Yes, I've no doubt you did! And how safe did you think I was? Can't you give me some account of the attention you gave to that?' She looked at him without reply to his challenge, but the full beauty of her silent face had only, as in two or three still throbs, to come out, to affect him suddenly with all the force of a check. The plea of her deep, pathetic eyes took the place of the admission that his passion vainly desired to impose upon her. They broke his resentment down; all his tenderness welled up with the change; it came out in supplication. 'I can't look at you and believe any ill of you. I feel for you everything I ever felt, and that we're committed to each other by a power that not even death can break. How can you look at me and not know to what depths I'm yours? You've the finest, sweetest chance that ever a woman had!'

She waited a little, and the firmness in her face, the intensity