That suggestion told.  He instantly gathered himself together, and nervously begged that she would send Marcella to him at once.  He could think of nothing, talk of nothing, till he had seen her.  She went, and Aldous was left to walk up and down the room planning what he should say.  After the ghastly intermingling of public interests and private misery in which he had lived for these many weeks there was a certain relief in having reached the cleared space—­the decisive moment—­when he might at last give himself wholly to what truly concerned him.  He would not lose her without a struggle.  None the less he knew, and had known ever since the scene in the Court library, that the great disaster of his life was upon him.

The handle of the door turned.  She was there.

He did not go to meet her.  She had come in wrought up to face attack—­reproaches, entreaties—­ready to be angry or to be humble, as he should give her the lead.  But he gave her no lead.  She had to break through that quivering silence as best she could.

“I wanted to explain everything to you,” she said in a low voice, as she came near to him.  “I know my note last night was very hard and abrupt.  I didn’t mean to be hard.  But I am still so tired—­and everything that one says, and feels, hurts so.”

She sank down upon a chair.  This womanish appeal to his pity had not been at all in her programme.  Nor did it immediately succeed.  As he looked at her, he could only feel the wantonness of this eclipse into which she had plunged her youth and beauty.  There was wrath, a passionate protesting wrath, under his pain.

“Marcella,” he said, sitting down beside her, “did you read my letter that I wrote you the day before—?”

“Yes.”

“And after that, you could still believe that I was indifferent to your grief—­your suffering—­or to the suffering of any human being for whom you cared?  You could still think it, and feel it?”

“It was not what you have said all through,” she replied, looking sombrely away from him, her chin on her hand, “it is what you have done.”

“What have I done?” he said proudly, bending forward from his seat beside her.  “What have I ever done but claim from you that freedom you desire so passionately for others—­freedom of conscience—­freedom of judgment?  You denied me this freedom, though I asked it of you with all my soul.  And you denied me more.  Through these five weeks you have refused me the commonest right of love—­the right to show you myself, to prove to you that through all this misery of differing opinion—­misery, much more, oh, much more to me than to you!—­I was in truth bent on the same ends with you, bearing the same burden, groping towards the same goal.”

“No! no!” she cried, turning upon him, and catching at a word; “what burden have you ever borne?  I know you were sorry—­that there was a struggle in your mind—­that you pitied me—­pitied them.  But you judged it all from above—­you looked down—­and I could not see that you had any right.  It made me mad to have such things seen from a height, when I was below—­in the midst—­close to the horror and anguish of them.”