“I shall feel lighter for telling you. It was so terrible to see him--oh, Stephen, if I had not loved you, I couldn’t have borne it--he seemed stricken. Oh, why is there all this pain in the world? And to think that I--Yvonne--should have had to inflict it--either on him, who has been good and kind to me, or on you, whom I love better than I thought I could love anything in the world! And when I had ended, he said, ‘He is young, and I am old; he has had all the sufferings and despair of life, and my lot has been cast in pleasant places; he has come out of the furnace with love and charity in his heart, and I have pampered my pride and uncharitableness. Go back to him--and I pray God to bless you both.’ He spoke as if each word was a knife driven into him--and his face--I shall never forget it--it seemed to grow old, and ashen, and hardened.”
She covered her face with her hands for a moment, and then, suddenly, the memory of the night flashing through her, she dashed them away with a woman’s fierceness and clasped his head.
“But your need was greater, a million times greater than his,” she cried in ringing tones, “and your sufferings greater, and your heart nobler, and I should have died if I had not come to you--you are my king, my lord, my God, my everything.”
In the formally appointed hotel sitting-room, where Yvonne had twice parted from him, sat Everard Chisely, with grey, withered face. The blow had fallen heavily. He had hungered for her of late years with a poor, human, unidealising passion. The pitifulness of it had galled his pride, and he had striven to put her out of his thoughts. He had lived an austere life, seeking in an unfamiliar asceticism to conquer the inherited, unregenerate cravings for a fuller aesthetic and emotional existence. Yet he had longed intensely for the death of the man who stood between himself and Yvonne. Twice a year his agent in Paris had reported news of Amédée Bazouge. Such communications he had opened with trembling fingers: the man was still alive; he prayed passionate prayers that the murder in his heart might not be counted to him as a sin. At last, in the New Zealand spring, came the news of Bazouge’s death. His blood tingled like the working sap in the trees. He could not wait. He came and found Yvonne.
