Chapter 24 - Page 2

it's because of you."

It was impossible to make the confession more
dispassionately, or in a tone less encouraging to the
vanity of the person addressed. Archer reddened to the
temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her
words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion
might drive off on startled wings, but that might
gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed.

"At least," she continued, "it was you who made me
understand that under the dullness there are things so
fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most
cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I
don't know how to explain myself"--she drew together
her troubled brows-- "but it seems as if I'd
never before understood with how much that is hard
and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may
be paid."

"Exquisite pleasures--it's something to have had
them!" he felt like retorting; but the appeal in her eyes
kept him silent.

"I want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with
you--and with myself. For a long time I've hoped this
chance would come: that I might tell you how you've
helped me, what you've made of me--"

Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. He
interrupted her with a laugh. "And what do you make out
that you've made of me?"

She paled a little. "Of you?"

"Yes: for I'm of your making much more than you
ever were of mine. I'm the man who married one
woman because another one told him to."

Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush. "I thought--
you promised--you were not to say such things today."

"Ah--how like a woman! None of you will ever see
a bad business through!"

She lowered her voice. "IS it a bad business--for
May?"

He stood in the window, drumming against the raised
sash, and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness
with which she had spoken her cousin's name.

"For that's the thing we've always got to think of--
haven't we--by your own showing?" she insisted.

"My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still
on the sea.

"Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought
with a painful application, "if it's not worth while to
have given up, to have missed things, so that others
may be saved from disillusionment and misery--then
everything I came home for, everything that made my
other life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because
no one there took account of them--all these things are
a sham or a dream--"

He turned around without moving from his place.
"And in that case there's no reason on earth why you
shouldn't go back?" he concluded for her.

Her eyes were clinging to him desperately. "Oh, IS
there no