that he at once let her go. I think that first his arms
that held her so close loosened (already the pressure had all gone out
of hers). I think she was sorry they had to loosen, and glad that they
had. Then his arms must have dropped to his sides. He did not at once
turn away, but kept on looking at her, as she at him--he, hurt, he did
not know why, but brimming with love and compassion and tenderness and
a little desperate with the effort to understand and to make allowances
for whatever might have to be understood. Her great blue eyes looked
almost black for once, prayer upon prayer was in their depths, they
were steady upon his and unfaltering. It was as if she was giving him
every opportunity to look down through them and see what was in her
soul.

It could not have been till many days later that a whole sequence of
episodes which hurt and could not be understood forced him into speech.
I think he must suddenly in a moment of trial, have come out with
something like this:

"Why, Lucy, it sometimes seems as if you didn't love me any more."

When she didn't answer, it must have flashed through him like a streak
of ice-cold lightning that perhaps she really didn't.

I am glad that it is only in imagination that I can hear his next
question and her answer. There must have been a something in his voice
from which the most callous-hearted would have wished to run, as from
the deathbed of a little child.

"_Don't_ you, Lucy?"

And how terribly it must have hurt her to answer that question!
Considering what he had been to her and she to him, for how long a
period of time neither had been able to see anything in this world
beyond the other, and considering with even more weight than these
things their own children for whom the feelings of neither could ever
really change, I think that Lucy ought to have lied. I think she ought
to have lied with all her might and main, lied as John Fulton would
have lied if the situation had been reversed, and that thereafter,
until his death or hers, she ought to have acted those lies, with
unflagging fervor and patience. Tenderness for him she never lost.
She might, upon that foundation, have built a saintly edifice of
simulated love and passion.

But it was not in her nature to lie. I think she probably said: "I
don't know. I'm afraid not." And then I think her sad face must have
begun to pucker like that of a little child going to cry, and I think
it is very likely,