“I think you are the same,” I said slowly, seeking vainly to express that indefinable extra light that seemed upon her face.

“Only perhaps more lovely.  But tell me what your reason was.  I cannot bear to think there is a dark gap between us.”

“You are so happy at this moment it seems a pity,” she murmured softly.  “You will not feel so happy when you know, and it’s all over and past and forgotten.  It’s a thunderstorm that has rolled by and left us again in the sunlight.  We are in Paradise now, are we not?”

I looked at her, and the triumph of delighted joy I had in her rose up to my brain, filling it, making all else seem 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.