"Then why are things wrong between us?"
"Are things wrong?"
"You know they are--ever since that morning when you wouldn"t come to Holy Communion."
"I was tired that morning."
"It is more than tiredness," he said, with sudden impatience, beating upon the counterpane with his fist. "Amy--you"re not behaving fairly. You must talk to me. I insist on it."
She turned once more towards him.
"What is it you want me to say?"
"Why you"re unhappy."
"But if I am not unhappy?"
"You are."
"But suppose I say that I am not?"
"You are. You are. You are!" he shouted at her.
"Very well, then, I am."
"Why are you?"
"Who _is_ happy really? At any rate for more than a moment. Only very thoughtless and silly people."
"You"re putting me off." He took her hand again. "I"m to blame, Amy--to blame in many ways. But people are talking."
She s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand away.
"People talking? Who?...But as though that mattered."
"It _does_ matter. It has gone far--much farther than I thought."
She looked at him then, quickly, and turned her face away again.
"Who"s talking? And what are they saying?"
"They are saying----" He broke off. What _were_ they saying? Until the arrival of that horrible letter he had not realised that they were saying anything at all.
"Don"t think for a single moment, Amy, that I pay the slightest attention to any of their talk. I would not have bothered you with any of this had it not been for something else--of which I"ll speak in a moment. If everything is right between us--between you and me--then it doesn"t matter if the whole world talks until it"s blue in the face."
"Leave it alone, then," she said. "Let them talk."
Her indifference stung him. She didn"t care, then, whether things were right between himself and her or no? It was the same to her. She cared so little for him.... That sudden realisation struck him so sharply that it was as though some one had hit him in the back. For so many years he had taken it for granted...taken something for granted that was not to be so taken. Very dimly some one was approaching him--that dark, misty, gigantic figure--blotting out the light from the windows. That figure was becoming day by day more closely his companion.
Looking at her now more intently, and with a new urgency, he said:
"Some one brought me a letter, Amy. They said it was a letter of yours."
She did not move nor stir. Then, after a long silence, she said, "Let me see it."
He felt in his pocket and produced it. She stretched out her hand and took it. She read it through slowly. "You think that I wrote this?" she asked.
"No, I know that you did not."
"To whom was it supposed to be written?"
"To "Morris of St. James"."
She nodded her head. "Ah, yes. We"re friends. That"s why they chose him.
Of course it"s a forgery," she added--"a very clever one."
"What I don"t understand," he said eagerly, at his heart the strangest relief that he did not dare to stop to a.n.a.lyse, "is why any one should have troubled to do this--the risk, the danger----"
"You have enemies," she said. "Of course you know that. People who are jealous."
"One enemy," he answered fiercely. "Ronder. The woman had been to him with this letter before she came to me."
"The woman! What woman?
"The woman who brought it to me was a Miss Milton--a wretched creature who was once at the Library."
"And she had been with this to Canon Ronder before she came to you?"
"Yes."
"Ah!"
Then she said very quietly:
"And what do you mean to do about the letter?"
"I will do whatever you wish me to do. What I would like to do is to leave no step untaken to bring the authors of this forgery to justice. No step.
I will----"
"No," she broke in quickly. "It is much better to leave it alone. What good can it do to follow it up? It only tells every one about it. We should despise it. The thing is so obviously false. Why you can see,"
suddenly holding the letter towards him, "it isn"t even like my writing.
My s"s, my m"s--they"re not like that----"
"No, no," he said eagerly. "I see that they are not. I saw that at once."
"You knew at once that it was a forgery?"
"I knew at once. I never doubted for an instant."