Peyton turned to her. The horses were climbing a hill, and his attention had strayed from them.
“This has done me good,” he began; but as he looked his voice changed. “Kate! What is it? Why are you crying? Oh, for God’s sake, _don’t_!” he ended, his hand closing on her wrist.
She steadied herself and raised her eyes to his.
“I--I couldn’t help it,” she stammered, struggling in the sudden release of her pent compassion. “It seems so awful that we should stand so close to this horror--that it might have been you who--”
“I who--what on earth do you mean?” he broke in stridently.
“Oh, don’t you see? I found myself exulting that you and I were so far from it--above it--safe in ourselves and each other--and then the other feeling came--the sense of selfishness, of going by on the other side; and I tried to realize that it might have been you and I who--who were down there in the night and the flood--”
Peyton let the whip fall on the ponies’ flanks. “Upon my soul,” he said with a laugh, “you must have a nice opinion of both of us.”
The words fell chillingly on the blaze of her self-immolation. Would she never learn to remember that Denis was incapable of mounting such hypothetical pyres? He might be as alive as herself to the direct demands of duty, but of its imaginative claims he was robustly unconscious. The thought brought a wholesome reaction of thankfulness.
“Ah, well,” she said, the sunset dilating through her tears, “don’t you see that I can bear to think such things only because they’re impossibilities? It’s easy to look over into the depths if one has a rampart to lean on. What I most pity poor Arthur for is that, instead of that woman lying there, so dreadfully dead, there might have been a girl like me, so exquisitely alive because of him; but it seems cruel, doesn’t it, to let what he was not add ever so little to the value of what you are? To let him contribute ever so little to my happiness by the difference there is between you?”
She was conscious, as she spoke, of straying again beyond his reach, through intricacies of sensation new even to her exploring susceptibilities. A happy literalness usually enabled him to strike a short cut through such labyrinths, and rejoin her smiling on the other side; but now she became wonderingly aware that he had been caught in the thick of her hypothesis.