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“I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters.”

He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an effort–“Don’t blame him–he’s impeccable. He helped me to get them published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to another man . . . a man who was dead. . . .”

She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.

“You DO despise me!” he insisted.

“Ah, that poor woman–that poor woman–” he heard her murmur.

“I spare no one, you see!” he triumphed over her. She kept her face hidden.

“You do hate me, you do despise me!” he strangely exulted.

“Be silent!” she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any check on his gathering purpose.

“He cared for you–he cared for you,” he repeated, “and he never told you of the letters–“

She sprang to her feet. “How can you?” she flamed. “How dare you? THAT–!”

Glennard was ashy pale. “It’s a weapon . . . like another. . . .”

“A scoundrel’s!”

He smiled wretchedly. “I should have used it in his place.”

“Stephen! Stephen!” she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. “Don’t say such things. I forbid you! It degrades us both.”

He put her back with trembling hands. “Nothing that I say of myself can degrade you. We’re on different levels.”

“I’m on yours, whatever it is!”

He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.

XIV

The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife, was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was but laboriously acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of communication; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed grotesque and mean.

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which he leaned.

They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it, to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned shade. If only they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring spring!

Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the inefficacy of such amends, the woman’s instinctive subjectiveness made her find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt was discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching, in its merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters, and this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched, meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which she regarded as the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness, to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still they did not speak.