Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/203

Rh of her effort to possess herself, settled into exaltation, at the same time that she might have struck a spectator as staring at some object of fear. 'I see my chance—I see it; but I don't see it as you see it. You must forgive me. My chance is not that chance. It has come to me—God knows why!—but in the hardest way of all. I made a great mistake—I recognise it.'

'So I must pay for it?' Barton Reeve asked.

She continued to look at him with her protected dread. 'We both did—so we must both pay.'

'Both? I beg your pardon,' said the young man: 'I utterly deny it—I made no mistake whatever. I'm just where I was—and everything else is. Everything but you!'

She looked away from him, but going on as if she had not heard him. 'We must do our duty—when once we see it. I didn't know—I didn't understand. But now I do. It's when one's eyes are opened—that the wrong is wrong.' Not as a lesson got by heart, not as a trick rehearsed in her room, but delicately, beautifully, step by step, she made it out for herself—and for him so far as he would take it. 'I can only follow the highest line.' Then, after faltering a moment, 'We must thank God,' she said, 'it isn't worse. My husband's here,' she added with a sufficient strangeness of effect.

But Barton Reeve accepted the mere fact as relevant. Do you mean he's in the house?

'Not at this moment. He's on the river—for the day. But he comes back to-morrow.'

'And he has been here since Friday?' She was silent, on this, so long that her visitor continued: 'It's none of my business?'

Again she hesitated, but at last she replied. 'Since Friday.'

'And you hate him as much as ever?'

This time she spoke out. 'More.'

Reeve made, with a sound irrepressible and scarce articulate, a motion that was a sort of dash at her. 'Ah, my own own!'