She dropped his hand at this, got up and, moving across the room, made straight a small picture to which, on examining it, he had given a slight push. Then turning round on him with her pale gaiety recovered, “I’ve forgiven him!” she declared.
“I know what you’ve done,” said Stransom “I know what you’ve done for years.” For a moment they looked at each other through it all with their long community of service in their eyes. This short passage made, to his sense, for the woman before him, an immense, an absolutely naked confession; which was presently, suddenly blushing red and changing her place again, what she appeared to learn he perceived in it. He got up and “How you must have loved him!” he cried.
“Women aren’t like men. They can love even where they’ve suffered.”
“Women are wonderful,” said Stransom. “But I assure you I’ve forgiven him too.”
“If I had known of anything so strange I wouldn’t have brought you here.”
“So that we might have gone on in our ignorance to the last?”
“What do you call the last?” she asked, smiling still.
At this he could smile back at her. “You’ll see—when it comes.”
She thought of that. “This is better perhaps; but as we were—it was good.”
He put her the question. “Did it never happen that he spoke of me?”
Considering more intently she made no answer, and he then knew he should have been adequately answered by her asking how often he himself had spoken of their terrible friend. Suddenly a brighter light broke in her face and an excited idea sprang to her lips in the appeal: “You _have_ forgiven him?”
She visibly winced at the deep but unintended irony of this; but even while she did so she panted quickly: “Then in the lights on your altar—?”
She stared with a dreadful fall, “But if he’s one of your Dead?”
“He’s one of the world’s, if you like—he’s one of yours. But he’s not one of mine. Mine are only the Dead who died possessed of me. They’re mine in death because they were mine in life.”
“_He _was yours in life then, even if for a while he ceased to be. If you forgave him you went back to him. Those whom we’ve once loved—”
“Are those who can hurt us most,” Stransom broke in.
“Ah it’s not true—you’ve _not_ forgiven him!” she wailed with a passion that startled him.
