He had dropped her hands, and she leaned close and lifted her arms to his neck with one of her rare gestures of surrender.

"I don't know why it is; but it makes me happier now to have been so foolish!"

Her lips were parted in a noiseless laugh and the tremor of her lashes made their shadow move on her cheek. He looked at her through a mist of pain and saw all her offered beauty held up like a cup to his lips; but as he stooped to it a darkness seemed to fall between them, her arms slipped from his shoulders and she drew away from him abruptly.

"But she WAS with you, then?" she exclaimed; and then, as he stared at her: "Oh, don't say no! Only go and look at your eyes!"

He stood speechless, and she pressed on: "Don't deny it--oh, don't deny it! What will be left for me to imagine if you do? Don't you see how every single thing cries it out? Owen sees it--he saw it again just now!

When I told him she'd relented, and would see him, he said: 'Is that Darrow's doing too?'"

Darrow took the onslaught in silence. He might have spoken, have summoned up the usual phrases of banter and denial; he was not even certain that they might not, for the moment, have served their purpose if he could have uttered them without being seen. But he was as conscious of what had happened to his face as if he had obeyed Anna's bidding and looked at himself in the gla.s.s. He knew he could no more hide from her what was written there than he could efface from his soul the fiery record of what he had just lived through. There before him, staring him in the eyes, and reflecting itself in all his lineaments, was the overwhelming fact of Sophy Viner's pa.s.sion and of the act by which she had attested it.

Anna was talking again, hurriedly, feverishly, and his soul was wrung by the anguish in her voice. "Do speak at last--you must speak! I don't want to ask you to harm the girl; but you must see that your silence is doing her more harm than your answering my questions could. You're leaving me only the worst things to think of her...she'd see that herself if she were here. What worse injury can you do her than to make me hate her--to make me feel she's plotted with you to deceive us?"

"Oh, not that!" Darrow heard his own voice before he was aware that he meant to speak. "Yes; I did see her in Paris," he went on after a pause; "but I was bound to respect her reason for not wanting it known."

Anna paled. "It was she at the theatre that night?"

"I was with her at the theatre one night."

"Why should she have asked you not to say so?"

"She didn't wish it known that I'd met her."

"Why shouldn't she have wished it known?"

"She had quarrelled with Mrs. Murrett and come over suddenly to Paris, and she didn't want the Farlows to hear of it. I came across her by accident, and she asked me not to speak of having seen her."

"Because of her quarrel? Because she was ashamed of her part in it?"

"Oh, no. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. But the Farlows had found the place for her, and she didn't want them to know how suddenly she'd had to leave, and how badly Mrs. Murrett had behaved. She was in a terrible plight--the woman had even kept back her month's salary. She knew the Farlows would be awfully upset, and she wanted more time to prepare them."

Darrow heard himself speak as though the words had proceeded from other lips. His explanation sounded plausible enough, and he half-fancied Anna's look grew lighter. She waited a moment, as though to be sure he had no more to add; then she said: "But the Farlows DID know; they told me all about it when they sent her to me."

He flushed as if she had laid a deliberate trap for him. "They may know NOW; they didn't then----"

"That's no reason for her continuing now to make a mystery of having met you."

"It's the only reason I can give you."

"Then I'll go and ask her for one myself." She turned and took a few steps toward the door.

"Anna!" He started to follow her, and then checked himself. "Don't do that!"

"Why not?"

"It's not like you...not generous..."

She stood before him straight and pale, but under her rigid face he saw the tumult of her doubt and misery.

"I don't want to be ungenerous; I don't want to pry into her secrets.

But things can't be left like this. Wouldn't it be better for me to go to her? Surely she'll understand--she'll explain...It may be some mere trifle she's concealing: something that would horrify the Farlows, but that I shouldn't see any harm in..." She paused, her eyes searching his face. "A love affair, I suppose...that's it? You met her with some man at the theatre--and she was frightened and begged you to fib about it? Those poor young things that have to go about among us like machines--oh, if you knew how I pity them!"

"If you pity her, why not let her go?"

She stared. "Let her go--go for good, you mean? Is that the best you can say for her?"

"Let things take their course. After all, it's between herself and Owen."

"And you and me--and Effie, if Owen marries her, and I leave my child with them! Don't you see the impossibility of what you're asking? We're all bound together in this coil."

Darrow turned away with a groan. "Oh, let her go--let her go."

"Then there IS something--something really bad? She WAS with some one when you met her? Some one with whom she was----" She broke off, and he saw her struggling with new thoughts. "If it's THAT, of course...Oh, don't you see," she desperately appealed to him, "that I must find out, and that it's too late now for you not to speak? Don't be afraid that I'll betray you...I'll never, never let a soul suspect. But I must know the truth, and surely it's best for her that I should find it out from you."

Darrow waited a moment; then he said slowly: "What you imagine's mere madness. She was at the theatre with me."

"With you?" He saw a tremor pa.s.s through her, but she controlled it instantly and faced him straight and motionless as a wounded creature in the moment before it feels its wound. "Why should you both have made a mystery of that?"

"I've told you the idea was not mine." He cast about. "She may have been afraid that Owen----"

"But that was not a reason for her asking you to tell me that you hardly knew her--that you hadn't even seen her for years." She broke off and the blood rose to her face and forehead. "Even if SHE had other reasons, there could be only one reason for your obeying her----" Silence fell between them, a silence in which the room seemed to become suddenly resonant with voices. Darrow's gaze wandered to the window and he noticed that the gale of two days before had nearly stripped the tops of the lime-trees in the court. Anna had moved away and was resting her elbows against the mantel-piece, her head in her hands. As she stood there he took in with a new intensity of vision little details of her appearance that his eyes had often cherished: the branching blue veins in the backs of her hands, the warm shadow that her hair cast on her ear, and the colour of the hair itself, dull black with a tawny under-surface, like the wings of certain birds. He felt it to be useless to speak.

After a while she lifted her head and said: "I shall not see her again before she goes."

He made no answer, and turning to him she added: "That is why she's going, I suppose? Because she loves you and won't give you up?"

Darrow waited. The paltriness of conventional denial was so apparent to him that even if it could have delayed discovery he could no longer have resorted to it. Under all his other fears was the dread of dishonouring the hour.

"She HAS given me up," he said at last.

XXVIII

When he had gone out of the room Anna stood where he had left her. "I must believe him! I must believe him!" she said.

A moment before, at the moment when she had lifted her arms to his neck, she had been wrapped in a sense of complete security. All the spirits of doubt had been exorcised, and her love was once more the clear habitation in which every thought and feeling could move in blissful freedom. And then, as she raised her face to Darrow's and met his eyes, she had seemed to look into the very ruins of his soul. That was the only way she could express it. It was as though he and she had been looking at two sides of the same thing, and the side she had seen had been all light and life, and his a place of graves...

She didn't now recall who had spoken first, or even, very clearly, what had been said. It seemed to her only a moment later that she had found herself standing at the other end of the room--the room which had suddenly grown so small that, even with its length between them, she felt as if he touched her--crying out to him "It IS because of you she's going!" and reading the avowal in his face.

That was his secret, then, THEIR secret: he had met the girl in Paris and helped her in her straits--lent her money, Anna vaguely conjectured--and she had fallen in love with him, and on meeting him again had been suddenly overmastered by her pa.s.sion. Anna, dropping back into her sofa-corner, sat staring these facts in the face.

The girl had been in a desperate plight--frightened, penniless, outraged by what had happened, and not knowing (with a woman like Mrs. Murrett) what fresh injury might impend; and Darrow, meeting her in this distracted hour, had pitied, counselled, been kind to her, with the fatal, the inevitable result. There were the facts as Anna made them out: that, at least, was their external aspect, was as much of them as she had been suffered to see; and into the secret intricacies they might cover she dared not yet project her thoughts.

"I must believe him...I must believe him..." She kept on repeating the words like a talisman. It was natural, after all, that he should have behaved as he had: defended the girl's piteous secret to the last. She too began to feel the contagion of his pity--the stir, in her breast, of feelings deeper and more native to her than the pains of jealousy.

From the security of her blessedness she longed to lean over with compa.s.sionate hands...But Owen? What was Owen's part to be? She owed herself first to him--she was bound to protect him not only from all knowledge of the secret she had surprised, but also--and chiefly!--from its consequences. Yes: the girl must go--there could be no doubt of it--Darrow himself had seen it from the first; and at the thought she had a wild revulsion of relief, as though she had been trying to create in her heart the delusion of a generosity she could not feel...