Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Successful Marriages

'Naturally – and that's just why.'

'Why you've wished to spare her?'

'Because she cares so tremendously much.'

Lance took a turn about the room, but with his eyes still on his host.

'How awfully – always – you must have liked her!'

'Awfully. Always,' said Peter Brench.

The young man continued for a moment to muse – then stopped again in front of him. 'Do you know how much she cares?' Their eyes met on it, but Peter, as if his own found something new in Lance's, appeared to hesitate, for the first time in an age, to say he did know. 'I've only just found out,' said Lance. 'She came to my room last night, after being present, in silence and only with her eyes on me, at what I had had to take from him: she came – and she was with me an extraordinary hour.'

He had paused again and they had again for a while sounded each other.

Then something – and it made him suddenly turn pale – came to Peter.

'She does know?'

'She does know. She let it all out to me – so as to demand of me no more than "that", as she said, of which she herself had been capable. She has always, always known,' said Lance without pity.

Peter was silent a long time; during which his companion might have heard him gently breathe, and on touching him might have felt within him the vibration of a long low sound suppressed. By the time he spoke at last he had taken everything in. 'Then I do see how tremendously much.'

'Isn't it wonderful?' Lance asked.

'Wonderful,' Peter mused.

'So that if your original effort to keep me from Paris was to keep me from knowledge – !' Lance exclaimed as if with a sufficient indication of this futility.

It might have been at the futility Peter appeared for a little to gaze. 'I think it must have been – without my quite at the time knowing it – to keep me!' he replied at last as he turned away.