A groan broke from Geoffrey's lips. Had it been any other woman at his feet, however his understanding might have condoned her innocent guilt, he must at the moment have shrunk from her. As it was, his groan was half for her, for the hideous helplessness of her remorse. His love yearned over her, and longed, in speechlessness, to shield her from herself.
"Oh, Maurice--my Maurice, I have killed you," Felicia said. "How can I live?"
He knelt beside her, his eyes on the piteous hand that blindly, patiently, wiped away the tears that fell and fell. He could not look at Maurice.
And with her sense of his nearness, his grief and his compassion, she shuddered with dreadful sobs.
"He went through that agony alone. He was so afraid of loneliness--so afraid of fear. He was like a little child. He came back to me--loving me--and he found that I had left him. He died thinking that I might always hate him. I can't live. I can't."
Geoffrey could not think clearly. No phrases of consolation came to him to lift her from her despair. He was with her in it. He could not lift her yet.
And it was no selfish claim that rose to his lips; rather it was the succouring instinct of life that spoke through him to show her life's supreme imperative as, putting his hand on hers and Maurice's, he stammered, "You must, you must. For me."
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