obscure and of no
account. Yet something in her words stirred my brain anxiously. Why
should I mind hearing what she had to say? Was it possible that she
had acted on her first letter to me, after all, and, while forcing
freedom on me, taken it also for herself? Was it possible she had lent
my possession, herself, to another? That blind, insensate jealousy of
the male in physical matters instantly flamed up through me. In that
moment of extreme passion for her, of expected triumph and delight, it
burnt at its most furious pitch. I felt I must _know_, must drag the
secret out of her, and if it was what I thought in that unreasoning
moment, I would kill us both.

I threw myself forward on her so that she could not move. "Now tell
me," I said. "You shall tell me, you promised you would."

Viola looked up at me with a regretful gaze but without any shrinking
from my savage look and grasp.

"Certainly I will," she said gently; "but you will regret forcing me
to tell you. Well, I left you, Trevor, because I found I was going to
be the mother of your child."

"Viola!"

Had she stabbed me in the breast as I leant over her, the shock could
not have been more great. To me the words seemed to go straight to my
heart and stop it. I could not speak beyond that one word. For the
moment I was absolutely stunned, paralysed. I took my hands from her
arms which I had been holding, rose from the couch mechanically, and
walked away from her, trying to realise, to understand what she had
said and its meaning.

This was the fact that stood out most clearly before my disordered
mental vision: knowing she was going to be in danger, to suffer, she
had fled from me to bear the burden of it alone. And, next, that I had
brought that burden and suffering on her. That spirit, so far above
earthly things, as I always thought her, I had dragged down to know
the common trials, share the common lot of earthly womanhood. The pain
of these two ideas, the agony they brought with them to me in those
moments was something almost unendurable. I felt crushed, absolutely
ground into the dust before it. I sat down by the table and put both
hands across my eyes, shutting out her exquisite vision, trying to
shut out my thoughts. I felt as a religious enthusiast might feel who
in a moment of drunken madness had outraged a sacred shrine.

Viola was to me, had always been, far more than a wife or a mistress
is to a man; she was also the Idea to my brain, an