She broke off there and looked intently up at him.  In her eyes he thought he saw incredulity fighting against a dawning hope.  “I wonder,” she went breathlessly on, “if you can understand this, too.  Can you see that, for him, the unbearable thing about it—­was that it was ludicrous?  The contrast between what he had believed me to be and—­what I am?”

He interrupted sharply, with a frown of irritation, “Don’t put it like that!”

“Well, then,” she amended, “the contrast between his explanation of the way I had been treating him, and the true one?”

“That is a thing I think I can understand,” he said.  “It was a sort of—­awakening of Don Quixote.  To a fine sensitive boy nothing could give a sharper wrench than that.—­I’m moving in the dark,” he added.  Yet he knew he was drawing near the light.  The secret he had set out to discover was not very far away.

“You see well enough,” she said.  “Better than Rush, though I tried to explain it to him.  He’d caught a surmise of the truth, too, I think, in New York, when he came back from France and brought me home.  But he wouldn’t look.  Father wouldn’t, either, once when I tried to tell him about it.  It was too horrible to be thought,—­let alone believed.—­I don’t quite see how I can have gone on believing it myself.”

The look he saw in her eyes made him wonder how she could.  He managed to hold his own gaze steady.  It gave him a sense of somehow supporting her.

“But you,” she said,—­“you, of all people in the world, don’t seem to feel that way about it.  You were there—­waiting for me—­before I even tried to tell you.  Oh, you do understand, don’t you?”

“I think,” he told her—­and the smile that came with the words was spontaneous enough, though it did feel rather tremulous—­“I think I could almost repeat the sentence you demolished young Stannard with in your own words.  But can’t you see why it doesn’t demolish me?  It’s because I love you.”

“So did he.  So do father and Rush.”

“Not you.  Not quite you.  Don’t you see?  It’s just the thing I was trying to tell you a while ago.  What they insist on loving is—­oh, partly you, of course, but partly a sort of—­projection of themselves that they call you, dress you out in, try to compel you to fit.  One can fight hard to preserve an outlying bit of one’s self like that.  But there would be a limit I should think.  How your brother, with a letter like that in his hands, could refuse to look at what you were trying to make him see ...”

“He had a theory, that began when we were in New York together as a sort of joke, that I was a case of shell-shock.  So whenever there has been anything really uncomfortable to face, he has always had that to fall back upon.”

A momentary outburst of anger escaped him.  “You’ve been tortured!” he cried furiously.  He reined in at once, however.  “You’ve never, then,” he went on quietly, “been able to tell the story to any one.  I’m sure you didn’t tell it to Graham Stannard.  You didn’t even try to.”