FullReads

She sighed.”Then it’s only another form of deception and a meaner one. Don’t you see that?”

“I see that we’re not accountable to any Lady Susans on earth!”

“Then why are you ashamed of what we are doing here?”

“Because I’m sick of pretending that you’re my wife when you’re not—when you won’t be.”

She looked at him sadly.

“If I were your wife you’d have to go on pretending. You’d have to pretend that I’d never been—anything else. And our friends would have to pretend that they believed what you pretended.”

Gannett pulled off the sofa tassel and flung it away.

“You’re impossible,” he groaned.

“It’s not I—it’s our being together that’s impossible. I only want you to see that marriage won’t help it.”

“What will help it then?”

She raised her head.

“My leaving you.”

“Your leaving me?” He sat motionless, staring at the tassel which lay at the other end of the room. At length some impulse of retaliation for the pain she was inflicting made him say deliberately:

“And where would you go if you left me?”

“Oh!” she cried, wincing.

He was at her side in an instant.

“Lydia—Lydia—you know I didn’t mean it; I couldn’t mean it! But you’ve driven me out of my senses; I don’t know what I’m saying. Can’t you get out of this labyrinth of self-torture? It’s destroying us both.”

“That’s why I must leave you.”

“How easily you say it!” He drew her hands down and made her face him.”You’re very scrupulous about yourself—and others. But have you thought of me? You have no right to leave me unless you’ve ceased to care—”

“It’s because I care—”

“Then I have a right to be heard. If you love me you can’t leave me.”

Her eyes defied him.

“Why not?”

He dropped her hands and rose from her side.

“Can you?” he said sadly.

The hour was late and the lamp flickered and sank. She stood up with a shiver and turned toward the door of her room.

V

At daylight a sound in Lydia’s room woke Ganett from a troubled sleep. He sat up and listened. She was moving about softly, as though fearful of disturbing him. He heard her push back one of the creaking shutters; then there was a moment’s silence, which seemed to indicate that she was waiting to see if the noise had roused him.

Presently she began to move again. She had spent a sleepless night, probably, and was dressing to go down to the garden for a breath of air. Gannett rose also; but some undefinable instinct made his movements as cautious as hers. He stole to his window and looked out through the slats of the shutter.

It had rained in the night and the dawn was gray and lifeless. The cloud-muffled hills across the lake were reflected in its surface as in a tarnished mirror. In the garden, the birds were beginning to shake the drops from the motionless laurustinus-boughs.

An immense pity for Lydia filled Gannett’s soul. Her seeming intellectual independence had blinded him for a time to the feminine cast of her mind. He had never thought of her as a woman who wept and clung: there was a lucidity in her intuitions that made them appear to be the result of reasoning. Now he saw the cruelty he had committed in detaching her from the normal conditions of life; he felt, too, the insight with which she had hit upon the real cause of their suffering. Their life was “impossible,” as she had said—and its worst penalty was that it had made any other life impossible for them. Even had his love lessened, he was bound to her now by a hundred ties of pity and self-reproach; and she, poor child, must turn back to him as Latude returned to his cell.

A new sound startled him: it was the stealthy closing of Lydia’s door. He crept to his own and heard her footsteps passing down the corridor. Then he went back to the window and looked out.

A minute or two later he saw her go down the steps of the porch and enter the garden. From his post of observation her face was invisible, but something about her appearance struck him. She wore a long traveling cloak and under its folds he detected the outline of a bag or bundle. He drew a deep breath and stood watching her.