"Now you see. Now you understand," she repeated. "I do, Geoffrey."
She had never called him by his name before.
"Let me tell you," she said, still leaning her head and shoulder against the side of the deep chair while she looked at him, unshaken now and calm. "Let me tell you that I see you and know you--and understand. Don't ever think that it has been wasted, or regret it, or feel that it has made sorrow where you meant it to make happiness. At first I could see nothing but my rage, my humiliation: but that has drifted away. I hardly feel anything now except my gratitude to you for your wonderful nobility--your love. To see it--to know it--is worth the suffering."
He could feel the tempests over which the calm had been won, and the calm moved him more than sobs or outcries. He looked from her head--the dear, proud head--to the letter that had laid it in the dust, and the conquered horror for a moment quivered across his face.
"How could he. To you." It was not question or exclamation, but a deep, sickened wonder.
"He had to. He did not love her enough to face your scorn--and my pain; he didn't love me enough to face hers. Fear is the very root of him." She paused, a question like a whip-lash cutting her. "You thought he loved me? You would not have given me to mere pity?"
"I?--who loved you enough to give you to the happiness you cried for?" it said.
"Forgive me for the mere thought. I have been such a chattel--a thing to be tossed appeasingly to a rival." Again she closed her eyes. "It makes me dizzy sometimes."
Geoffrey wandered off again to the window. He could not contemplate her pain, and for a long time there was silence in the room while he gazed, as Felicia had gazed, over the desolate country. The rain swept around the hill-top like a mantle; all but the nearest trees were blotted out.
Geoffrey was thinking of Felicia, of Maurice, holding his thoughts steadily from a dangerous thinking of himself; he needed to hold them steadily. He was seeing Maurice, his Maurice--how near his heart he only now clearly saw when at once that heart seemed to spurn him, with a wicked joy in his baseness, and then to catch him back, lamenting--seeing the boy, loving, impulsive, full of fears and intrepidities, needing always the strong arm to fall back on; the man, so boyish still, so weak, so generous; the sad friend of the other night, who, whatever his falsity, had spoken truth; and the poisonous letter was growing in his thoughts to the simile of some fatal trap that had caught his friend in a moment of dizziness and imprisoned him in baseness. Such baseness! Unforgiveable. And yet--was it essential? Still holding his thoughts away from the aspect where Maurice's baseness would serve himself, he balanced that question of the real significance of the baseness. Something in his mind, wrenched with his refusal to see the other aspect, bled, panted, protested. Then came dying throbs. He grasped at last his own decision.