"No, dear, no." Milly covered her own eyes. Ah!--those cravings to which Christina had responded;--now so dead.
"I shall get better," said Christina. "I feel it now; I know it. I shall get better and be always with you. My darling. My Milly. My little Milly." Her voice had sunken to a shrouded whisper.
Held by those cold, clutching fingers, Milly sat sobbing. Christina would not get better; and, with horror at herself, she knew that only at the gates of death could she love Christina and be with her. And, glancing round at the head on the pillow--ah!--poor head!--Christina's wonderful head!--more wonderful than ever now, so eager, so doomed, so white, with all its flood of black, black hair--glancing at its ebony and marble, she saw that she need have no fear of life. Christina would not get better.
She spoke again, brokenly. "If you had loved him, you would have hated me. Now you will never hate me."
"You will not send for him? You will not see him alone? You will stay with me?"
"I shall get better," Christina repeated, turning her head on Milly's arm. But the disarray of her mind still whispered on in vague fragments.--"It was not useless.--I was right.--I did not need to tell; you were mine; I had not lost you."
A few hours afterwards, her head still turned on Milly's arm, Christina died.
Sitting alone on a winter day in the library of Chawlton, Milly heard the sound of a motor outside. Since Christina's death she had shut herself away, refusing to see anyone, and she listened now with apathetic interest, expecting to hear the retreating wheels. But the motor did not move away. Instead, after some delay at the door, steps crossed the hall, familiar, wonderful, dear and terrible. Dick had returned.
All the irony and humiliation of her married life rose before her as she felt herself trembling, flushing, with the joy and terror. He had come back; and so he had not guessed. Or was it that he had guessed and yet was too kind not to come? She had only time to snatch at conjecture, for Dick was before her.
Dick's demeanour was as unemphatic as she remembered it always to have been. It was almost as casual as if he had returned from a day's hunting merely. Yet there was difference, too, though what it was her hurrying thoughts could not seize. She felt it as a radiance of pity, warm and almost vehement.
