“Oh, I don’t know what to think!” she broke out. “You say you didn’t know she loved you. But you know it now. Doesn’t that show you how you can put the broken bits together?”
“Can you seriously think it would be doing so to marry one woman while I care for another?”
“Oh, I don’t know…I don’t know…” The sense of her weakness made her try to harden herself against his arguments.
“You do know! We’ve often talked of such things: of the monstrousness of useless sacrifices. If I’m to expiate, it’s not in that way.” He added abruptly: “It’s in having to say this to you now…”
She found no answer.
Through the silent apartment they heard the sudden peal of the door-bell, and she rose to her feet. “Owen!” she instantly exclaimed.
“Is Owen in Paris?”
She explained in a rapid undertone what she had learned from Sophy Viner.
“Shall I leave you?” Darrow asked.
“Yes…no…” She moved to the dining-room door, with the half-formed purpose of making him pass out, and then turned back. “It may be Adelaide.”
They heard the outer door open, and a moment later Owen walked into the room. He was pale, with excited eyes: as they fell on Darrow, Anna saw his start of wonder. He made a slight sign of recognition, and then went up to his step- mother with an air of exaggerated gaiety.
“You furtive person! I ran across the omniscient Adelaide and heard from her that you’d rushed up suddenly and secretly ” He stood between Anna and Darrow, strained, questioning, dangerously on edge.
“I came up to meet Mr. Darrow,” Anna answered. “His leave’s been prolonged–he’s going back with me.”
The words seemed to have uttered themselves without her will, yet she felt a great sense of freedom as she spoke them.
The hard tension of Owen’s face changed to incredulous surprise. He looked at Darrow. “The merest luck…a colleague whose wife was ill…I came straight back,” she heard the latter tranquilly explaining. His self-command helped to steady her, and she smiled at Owen.
“We’ll all go back together tomorrow morning,” she said as she slipped her arm through his.
Chapter XXXIII
Owen Leath did not go back with his step-mother to Givre. In reply to her suggestion he announced his intention of staying on a day or two longer in Paris.
Anna left alone by the first train the next morning. Darrow was to follow in the afternoon. When Owen had left them the evening before, Darrow waited a moment for her to speak; then, as she said nothing, he asked her if she really wished him to return to Givre. She made a mute sign of assent, and he added: “For you know that, much as I’m ready to do for Owen, I can’t do that for him-I can’t go back to be sent away again.”
“No–no!”
He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All her fears seemed to fall from her as he held her. It was a different feeling from any she had known before: confused and turbid, as if secret shames and rancours stirred in it, yet richer, deeper, more enslaving. She leaned her head back and shut her eyes beneath his kisses. She knew now that she could never give him up.
Nevertheless she asked him, the next morning, to let her go back alone to Givre. She wanted time to think. She was convinced that what had happened was inevitable, that she and Darrow belonged to each other, and that he was right in saying no past folly could ever put them asunder. If there was a shade of difference in her feeling for him it was that of an added intensity. She felt restless, insecure out of his sight: she had a sense of incompleteness, of passionate dependence, that was somehow at variance with her own conception of her character.
It was partly the consciousness of this change in herself that made her want to be alone. The solitude of her inner life had given her the habit of these hours of self- examination, and she needed them as she needed her morning plunge into cold water.