me to pull along, because by the fact
that you didn't speak I understood that you thought I should be brave,
and I have been--thanks to you, and I shall be--thanks to you! Oh!"
she cried passionately, "if you think because I am saying it all out
that I want to go back, that I don't see what I am running away from,
and what you mean, you're cruel, you're cruel!"

Her other hand had found its fellow and they both lay on his shoulders.

"I only think of you," he breathed, "and of how..."

She covered his lips. "Oh, hush, hush, you have told me, in the only
way there was to tell. I'm too stupid to be able to combine a lover
and a husband. The day and the hour you spoke I should never have seen
my husband again. And that's where it stands; that's how it is, and
you know it. You loved me because I was like that, and I love you
because you are the bravest of the brave. There you are!" she cried,
and drew away from him triumphantly, letting her arms fall. "There we
both are!"

"Have you any vague conception of what this is for me?" Bulstrode asked.

"Oh, I dare say," she exclaimed, with a kind of petulance, "that I am
only thinking of my own bewildering happiness. There," she exclaimed
at his face, "I see you have a new weapon: pity. Oh, don't use that
against me, and I warn you that everything in the world will crumble if
you speak."

Her hands, which he was holding closely, she drew from him and laid
them both on his breast and met his eyes full with her own. Her lips
were slightly trembling, and she was as white as a winter day. In the
moment of silence they passed like this, she seemed to him like some
great precious pearl, some priceless rose fragrant, lustrous, made for
him, gathered for him, and yet beyond his right. She seemed, above
all, the woman, the mate; her glorious sex, her tenderness, her
humanness, drew him and dazzled him; and, nevertheless, through his
daze and over his desire, he heard with his finest her cry:

"Jimmy, Jimmy, don't speak, don't speak. Ah, if you really love me..."

He really loved her. Rising from where he knelt by her chair,
Bulstrode went over, stood a second by the chimneypiece, and then took
a few paces up and down the room, came back to her and said the thing
the real man says to the woman he really loves:

"I want to make you happy, Mary. I will do whatever you wish me to do."

"Ah, then, go!"

Bulstrode looked wearily about as though of its own accord a doo