For the first time in her life she really
showed strong emotions in regard to me, for the first time, perhaps,
they really came to her. She began to weep slow, reluctant tears. I came
into her room, and found her asprawl on the bed, weeping.
"I didn't know," she cried. "Oh! I didn't understand!"
"I've been a fool. All my life is a wreck!
"I shall be alone!...MUTNEY! Mutney, don't leave me! Oh! Mutney! I
didn't understand."
I had to harden my heart indeed, for it seemed to me at moments in those
last hours together that at last, too late, the longed-for thing had
happened and Marion had come alive. A new-born hunger for me lit her
eyes.
"Don't leave me!" she said, "don't leave me!" She clung to me; she
kissed me with tear-salt lips.
I was promised now and pledged, and I hardened my heart against this
impossible dawn. Yet it seems to me that there were moments when it
needed but a cry, but one word to have united us again for all our
lives. Could we have united again? Would that passage have enlightened
us for ever or should we have fallen back in a week or so into the old
estrangement, the old temperamental opposition?
Of that there is now no telling.
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