It was like a wild, impossible dream. Their faces stared at each other; their hands seized each other; they spoke, their voices clashing, and shaken by strangling sobs.
"How dare you say that to me! You have broken my heart! You haven't cared for years--for years!" Kitty cried. "I've longed--longed. It is too horrible. How dare you come and tell me that you are going to die and that it will make me a little sad. Oh! I love you--and you are horrible to me."
"That too! You can say that! To me! To me!"
"It's true. You know you lie. I haven't loved you as I did. But I've cared--good God! I see now how much.--It is you who have ceased to care."
At these words Kitty was transfigured. Joy, joy unmistakable, flamed up in her. It mounted to her eyes and lips, revivifying her ravaged face, beaming forth, inundating him, unfaltering, assured, absolute. "Darling--darling--you love me? you do love me?--Oh, you shan't die--I won't let you die. My love will keep you with me. We will forget all these years when we haven't understood--when we've forgotten. We will forget everything--except that we love each other and that that is all there is to live for in the world."
"And--Sir Walter?--" he said, simply and helplessly.
Kitty's arms were about his neck, her transfigured face was upturned to him. Worshipped by those eyes, held in that embrace, his words, in his own ears, were absurd. Yet he hadn't been dreaming yesterday. Kitty might make the words seem absurd; but even Kitty's eyes and Kitty's arms could not conjure away the facts of the sunlit summer-house, the tears, the parting kiss. What of Sir Walter? What else was there left to say?
But after he had said them, and stood looking at her, it was as if his words released the last depths of her rapture. She did not flush or falter or show, even, any shock or surprise. Her arms about him, her eyes on his, it was a stiller, a more solemn joy that dwelt on him and enfolded him.
"I heard you last evening," Holland answered. "I was sitting outside the summer-house. You said you loved him. You let him kiss you."
"You will forgive me," said Kitty. They were looking at each other like two children. "I thought I loved him, because I was so unhappy, and he is so dear and kind and loves me so much. I must love some one. I must be loved. I was so lonely. And you seemed not to care at all any more. You were only my husband, you weren't my lover.--And you don't know all. He doesn't know it. But I know it now. And I must tell you everything--all the dreadful weakness--you must understand it all. Perhaps, if this hadn't come, perhaps, if you hadn't been given back to me like this, I might have gone away with him, Nicholas. It wasn't that I had ceased to love you; it was that I had to be loved and was weak before love. It is dreadful;--I believe all women are like that. And I did struggle, oh, I did. Nicholas, you will forgive me?"