“I’ve hurt you horribly,” he said, when he could command his voice.  “Probing in like that.”

This must be the unendurable tragedy she had referred to a while ago.  She was speaking, voicelessly and he bent down to listen.

“... if you knew the comfort!  I suppose I ought to be frightened—­at your guessing like that, but it seems natural, to-night, that you should.—­You know who it was, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he told her confidently.  “It happened just to-day, didn’t it?”

“It was yesterday he asked me to marry him,” she said.  “That wasn’t hounding.  He had a right to, I mean.  I thought I would marry him, once.  I told him I would if I could.  I meant, I would if I could make him understand what I really was.  He thought I meant something altogether different, something that his image of me might have meant quite nicely.  Yesterday when he asked me again, I flew into a fury and told him what I am really like.  I needn’t have done it.  I could have told him that the reason I wouldn’t marry him was because I was in love with you.  That would have been true—­in a way.  I mean, it wasn’t the reason in the beginning; nor even after I was in love with you—­so long as you didn’t know.  But I never thought of telling him that.  I just wanted to—­smash that image of his.  And I did.  I knew it was cruel when I did it, but not how terrible until this morning when Rush got a letter from him.”

She had to stop there to master a sob.  He went around the table and took her in his arms.  “Come over to the big chair,” he said, “where I can—­hold you.  I can’t let you go on like this.  You can tell me the rest of it there.”

She released herself from his hands by taking them in her own and pressing them for a moment tight.  Then she let them go.

“I couldn’t,” she said.  “I couldn’t be comforted like that while I was telling you about him.”

He understood instantly.  “That’s like you,” he commented.  “You’re always like yourself, thank God.”  He walked away to the chair he had invited her to and stood behind it, gripping its padded leather back.  “He wrote your brother a letter then.”  He had spoken, he thought, quietly and evenly enough, but the indignation he felt must have betrayed itself in his voice for she answered instantly: 

“You mustn’t be angry about that.  He had to write to Rush, you see.  Rush had been in his confidence about it all the while.  Rush knew his hopes and his explanations.  Rush knew of his coming yesterday, was waiting up at Wallace Hood’s apartment for his news.  Now, do you see how horrible it was?  He couldn’t tell Rush what I had said to him.  There was nothing he could tell him.  He couldn’t even face him.  He did the only thing I’d left for him to do.”

March asked, “What has he done?”

“We don’t know, exactly.  Just gone away, I suppose.  The letter was written about midnight from the University Club.  He said he wasn’t coming back to Hickory Hill.  That he couldn’t possibly come back.  He’d arrange things, somehow, later.  He told Rush not to try to find him nor make any sort of fuss, and to be very kind to me; not to question nor worry me.”