A strangled sound broke from Alice’s lips, but she bit it back before it had formed into a word.  The hand that she had thrown out blindly fell on the fringe of her gown, and she began knitting it together with trembling fingers.  “Has he—­does he care for you?” she asked presently in that hurried voice.

For the second time Corinna hesitated; and in that instant of hesitation, she broke irrevocably with the past and with the iron rule of tradition.  She knew how her mother, how her grandmother, how all the strong and quiet women of her race would have borne themselves in a crisis like this—­the implications and evasions which would have walled them within the garden that was their world.  Her mother, she realized, would have been as incapable of facing the situation as she would have been of creating it.

“Yes, he cares for me,” she answered frankly; and then, before the terror that leaped into the eyes of the other woman, as if she longed to turn and run out of the house, Corinna touched her gently on the shoulder.  “Don’t look like that!” It was unendurable to her compassionate heart that she should have brought that look into the eyes of any living creature.

She led Alice back to the chairs they had left; and when the servant came in to turn on the softly shaded lamps, they sat there, facing each other, in a silence which seemed to Corinna to be louder than any sound.  There was the noise of wonder in it, and tragedy, and something vaguely menacing to which she could not give a name.  It was fear, and yet it was not fear because it was so much worse.  Only the blank terror in Alice’s face, the terror of the woman who has lost hope, could express what it meant.  And this terror translated into sound asked presently: 

“Are—­are you sure?”

A wave of pity surged through Corinna’s heart.  Her strength became to her something on which she could rest—­which would not fail her; and she understood why she had had to meet so many disappointments in life, why she had had to bear so much that was almost unbearable.  It was because, however strong emotion was in her nature, there was always something deep down in her that was stronger than any emotion.  She had been ruled not by passion but by law, by some clear moral discernment of things as they ought to be; and this was why weak persons, or those who were the prey to their own natures, leaned on her with all their weight.  In that instant of self-realization she knew that the refuge of the weak would be for ever denied her, that she should always be alone because she was strong enough to rely on her own spirit.

“Before I answer your question,” she said, “I must know if you have the right to ask it.”

The wistful eyes grew bright again.  How graceful she was, thought Corinna as she watched her; and she knew that this woman, with her clinging sweetness, like the sweetness of honeysuckle, and her shallow violence of mood, could win the kind of love that had been denied to her own royal beauty.  This other woman was the ephemeral incarnate, the thing for which men gave their lives.  She was nothing; and therefore every man would see in her the reflection of what he desired.