She cried out, "It would have been better for me if I had been. I shouldn't _feel_ then. It wouldn't hurt me to see little children. I should have got over that long ago; and I shouldn't have cared for you or them. I shouldn't have been able to. We get like that. And then--I needn't have let you care for me. That was the worst thing I ever did. But I was so happy--so happy."
He could not look at her; he covered his face with his hands, and she knew that he cared still.
Then she came and knelt down beside him and whispered. He got up and broke away from her and she followed him.
He did not leave her. They sat still, separated by the length of the little room, staring, not at each other, but at some point in the distance, as if each brain had flung and fixed there the same unspeakable symbol of its horror.
Her face was sharp with pain, was strangely purified, spiritualised by the immortal moment that uplifted her. His face, grown old in a moment, had lost its look of glad and incorruptible innocence.
Not that he was yet in full possession of reality. His mind was sunk in the stupor that follows after torture. It kept its hold by one sense only, the vague discerning of profound responsibility, and of something profounder still, some tie binding him to Kitty, immaterial, indestructible, born of their communion in pain.
It kept him by its intangible compulsion, sitting there in the same small room, divided from her, but still there, still wearing that strange air of participation, of complicity.
And all the time he kept saying to himself, "What next?"
"It's Jane," he said. "I'll tell her not to come in." His voice sounded hoarse and unlike his own.
He looked up with his clouded eyes. "Do you want to?"
"Mind?" he repeated. As if, after what they had gone through, there could ever be anything to mind. It seemed to him that things would always henceforth be insubstantial, and events utterly unimportant. He tried with an immense effort to grasp this event of Jane's appearance and of Kitty's attitude to Jane.
"I thought," he said, "perhaps she would bother you."
"Robert," she said, "I don't want her to know--what I told you."
Jane came in and closed the door behind her. She had a letter folded tightly in her hand. She stood there a moment, looking from one to the other. It was Kitty who spoke.