“A woman whom he did not love,” Florence kept on; “to whom he was tied by old promises, with whom now there was nothing but an old friendship?”
“I mean this woman did not—was not in love with him any more. When she knew of—of you, she released him.”
“Then he didn’t keep faith with her—with either!” Julia cried, still fixing Florence with her white, quivering face.
Julia seemed to stand there irrationally, convinced by the sound of Florence Essington’s voice—by just the weight of its own deep, passionate conviction.
“Then why couldn’t he have told me?” the girl murmured forlornly. “I would have believed him! Why couldn’t he trust me!”
The last words caught a little bitter echo in the woman’s heart. She silenced it. She took Julia by the shoulders, who had slid to the floor, half kneeling, half sitting, the tears slipping down her cheeks.
“Even if you love him,” she cried, “isn’t he human? Can’t you forgive him that much? He will forgive you—men forgive more in women!”
Julia’s hands held the folds of her gown. “But what can I do?” she implored. She hung on the other’s words with a passionate dependence.
Florence, with an impulse, took the face between her hands.
“Be sure you want him more than anything else,” she murmured.
The head inclined faintly. The wide eyes still held hers with their piteous stare and falling tears.
“Go to him,” Florence whispered. She felt the girl trembling.
“That will come afterward. Never mind any of the rest of us—what we do and say. It doesn’t matter. Only think of him! Promise me you won’t leave him until you have made it right!”
“Are you sure I can?” the girl whispered, with such a face of hope and fear, such joy struggling with tears, that Florence, remembering in what hard ways even the greatest love may lead, leaned down and kissed her.
Julia drew yet closer. “Are you _sure_ he—he loves me?” The last words were a breath.
Florence drew back coldly. “You must go _now_,” she said. Then seeing Julia shrink at her strange, dry voice, she added, “Do you think he would tell that to _me_?”—at what cost she herself did not measure.
But she did not realize that she was in the midst of her crisis. She was too much in it to look back or forward. She saw only outward actions, the minute present. When she spoke with the nurse at the door of the sick-room her voice was even matter-of-fact.