needn't have let you care for me. That was the worst thing I ever did.
But I was so happy--so happy."

He could not look at her; he covered his face with his hands, and she
knew that he cared still.

Then she came and knelt down beside him and whispered. He got up and
broke away from her and she followed him.

"You can't marry me _now_," she said.

And he answered, "No."

CHAPTER XIX

He did not leave her. They sat still, separated by the length of the
little room, staring, not at each other, but at some point in the
distance, as if each brain had flung and fixed there the same
unspeakable symbol of its horror.

Her face was sharp with pain, was strangely purified, spiritualised by
the immortal moment that uplifted her. His face, grown old in a moment,
had lost its look of glad and incorruptible innocence.

Not that he was yet in full possession of reality. His mind was sunk in
the stupor that follows after torture. It kept its hold by one sense
only, the vague discerning of profound responsibility, and of something
profounder still, some tie binding him to Kitty, immaterial,
indestructible, born of their communion in pain.

It kept him by its intangible compulsion, sitting there in the same
small room, divided from her, but still there, still wearing that
strange air of participation, of complicity.

And all the time he kept saying to himself, "What next?"

There was a knock at the door.

"It's Jane," he said. "I'll tell her not to come in." His voice sounded
hoarse and unlike his own.

"Oh, mayn't I see her?"

He looked up with his clouded eyes. "Do you want to?"

"Yes."

He considered. He hesitated.

"Do you mind?"

"Mind?" he repeated. As if, after what they had gone through, there
could ever be anything to mind. It seemed to him that things would
always henceforth be insubstantial, and events utterly unimportant. He
tried with an immense effort to grasp this event of Jane's appearance
and of Kitty's attitude to Jane.

"I thought," he said, "perhaps she would bother you."

The knock came again.

"Robert," she said, "I don't want her to know--what I told you."

"Of course not," he said. "Come in."

Jane came in and closed the door behind her. She had a letter folded
tightly in her hand. She stood there a moment, looking from one to the
other. It was Kitty who spoke.

"Come in, Janey," she said. "I want you."

Jane came forward and stood between them. She looked at Robert wh