And when I asked her if she was happy, she said, in a voice little above a whisper, "Yes--now."
Then, with another deep, clear look, she added, "I think I have all the best of Life."
It did not occur to me just then to wonder what she meant by that "now." I was pondering her last words. All at once, on a sudden impulse (though I was pretty sure beforehand what her answer would be), I said:
Her answer was supremely tranquil and unaffected.
"Yes--as far as he was ever there to leave. It meant nothing--a folly--merely stupid--it had no significance whatever. I've no grudge against him. He didn't really wrong me. It hardly mattered, ever--it doesn't matter--now----"
A question must have shown in my eyes even as I decided not to put it, for all at once she laughed a little.
"Oh, I'd tell you if you wished to know, but you'd be no wiser. It's a name you've never heard. But one thing I should like----" For one moment she hesitated.
"No; but I should like you to know one thing--oh, quite for my own sake! If ever you _should_ hear a name--three names--four--you needn't believe them. I lied perfectly recklessly. It seemed to me--stupidly perhaps--that I owed him that. So I blackened myself. You see, they tried to find out--my friends----"
"Oh, one lover was enough," she answered, with another laugh, rich, low, and without bitterness. "And it doesn't matter--_now_."
It was then that I knew what she meant by that reiterated "now." The thing that beat suddenly in on me explained in a flash that curious attitude of protection towards myself. That kiss blown from the top of the morning bus--the shillings she earned by sitting to morose and impatient artists--those heavenly Sundays--that desertion which also she ranked as a happiness--her self-slanders rather than betray her betrayer--all these things together had not, somehow, seemed to me to make up that "best part of Life" of which she spoke. Beyond even her beautiful devotion to her boy must lie some other deep sustaining dream. Without such a dream, her life would not have been what patently it was--full....
But now it was all in the eyes she turned on me....
And I knew that the look that told me she loved _me_, had long loved me, and must now go on loving me to the end, put love between us high out of our reach for ever.