of surrender.
“I don’t know why it is; but it makes me happier now to have been so foolish!”
Her lips were parted in a noiseless laugh and the tremor of her lashes made their shadow move on her cheek. He looked at her through a mist of pain and saw all her offered beauty held up like a cup to his lips; but as he stooped to it a darkness seemed to fall between them, her arms slipped from his shoulders and she drew away from him abruptly.
“But she WAS with you, then?” she exclaimed; and then, as he stared at her: “Oh, don’t say no! Only go and look at your eyes!”
He stood speechless, and she pressed on: “Don’t deny it—oh, don’t deny it! What will be left for me to imagine if you do? Don’t you see how every single thing cries it out? Owen sees it—he saw it again just now! When I told him she’d relented, and would see him, he said: ‘Is that Darrow’s doing too?’”
Darrow took the onslaught in silence. He might have spoken, have summoned up the usual phrases of banter and denial; he was not even certain that they might not, for the moment, have served their purpose if he could have uttered them without being seen. But he was as conscious of what had happened to his face as if he had obeyed Anna’s bidding and looked at himself in the glass. He knew he could no more hide from her what was written there than he could efface from his soul the fiery record of what he had just lived through. There before him, staring him in the eyes, and reflecting itself in all his lineaments, was the overwhelming fact of Sophy Viner’s passion and of the act by which she had attested it.
Anna was talking again, hurriedly, feverishly, and his soul was wrung by the anguish in her voice. “Do speak at last—you must speak! I don’t want to ask you to harm the girl; but you must see that your silence is doing her more harm than your answering my questions could. You’re leaving me only the worst things to think of her…she’d see that herself if she were here. What worse injury can you do her than to make me hate her—to make me feel she’s plotted with you to deceive us?”
“Oh, not that!” Darrow heard his own voice before he was aware that he meant to speak. “Yes; I did see her in Paris,” he went on after a pause; “but I was bound to respect her reason for not wanting it known.”
Anna paled. “It was she at the theatre that night?”
“I was with her at the theatre one night.”
“Why should she have asked you not to say so?”
“She didn’t wish it known that I’d met her.”
“Why shouldn’t she have wished it known?”
“She had quarrelled with Mrs. Murrett and come over suddenly to Paris, and she didn’t want the Farlows to hear of it. I came across her by accident, and she asked me not to speak of having seen her.”
“Because of her quarrel? Because she was ashamed of her part in it?”
“Oh, no. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. But the Farlows had found the place for her, and she didn’t want them to know how suddenly she’d had to leave, and how badly Mrs. Murrett had behaved. She was in a terrible plight—the woman had even kept back her month’s salary. She knew the Farlows would be awfully upset, and she wanted more time to prepare them.”
Darrow heard himself speak as though the words had proceeded from other lips. His explanation sounded plausible enough, and he half-fancied Anna’s look grew lighter. She waited a moment, as though to be sure he had no more to add; then she said: “But the Farlows DID know; they told me all about it when they sent her to me.”
He flushed as if she had laid a deliberate trap for him. “They may know NOW; they didn’t then–-“
“That’s no reason for her continuing now to make a mystery of having met you.”
“It’s the only reason I can give you.”
“Then I’ll go and ask her for one myself.” She turned and took a few steps toward the door.
“Anna!” He started to follow her, and then checked himself. “Don’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“It’s not like you…not generous…”
She stood before him straight and pale, but under her rigid face he saw the tumult of her doubt and misery.
“I don’t want to be ungenerous; I don’t want to pry into her secrets. But things can’t be left like this. Wouldn’t it be better for me to go to her? Surely she’ll understand—she’ll explain…It may be some mere trifle she’s concealing: something that would horrify the Farlows, but that I shouldn’t see any harm in…” She paused, her eyes searching his face. “A love affair, I suppose…that’s it? You met her with some man at the theatre—and she was frightened and begged you to fib about it? Those poor young things that have to go about among us like machines —oh, if you knew how I pity them!”
“If you pity her, why not let her go?”
She stared. “Let her go—go for good, you mean? Is that the best you can say for her?”
“Let things take their course. After all, it’s between herself and Owen.”
“And you and me—and Effie, if Owen marries her, and I leave my child with them! Don’t you see the impossibility of what you’re asking? We’re all bound together in this coil.”
Darrow turned away with a groan. “Oh, let her go—let her go.”
“Then there IS something—something really bad? She WAS with some one when you met her? Some one with whom she was–-” She broke off, and he saw her struggling with new thoughts. “If it’s THAT, of course…Oh, don’t you see,” she desperately appealed to him, “that I must find out, and that it’s too late now for you not to speak? Don’t be afraid that I’ll betray you…I’ll never, never let a soul suspect. But I must know the truth, and surely it’s best for her that I should find it out from you.”
