Sanctuary | Page 5

arms were interlocked with other
arms--they had dragged each other deeper, poor souls, like drowning
people who fight together in the waves! Kate's visualizing habit gave a
hateful precision and persistency to the image she had evoked--she
could not rid herself of the vision of anguished shapes striving together
in the darkness. The horror of it took her by the throat--she drew a
choking breath, and felt the tears on her face.
Peyton turned to her. The horses were climbing a hill, and his attention
had strayed from them.
"This has done me good," he began; but as he looked his voice changed.
"Kate! What is it? Why are you crying? Oh, for God's sake, _don't_!"
he ended, his hand closing on her wrist.
She steadied herself and raised her eyes to his.
"I--I couldn't help it," she stammered, struggling in the sudden release
of her pent compassion. "It seems so awful that we should stand so
close to this horror--that it might have been you who--"
"I who--what on earth do you mean?" he broke in stridently.
"Oh, don't you see? I found myself exulting that you and I were so far
from it--above it--safe in ourselves and each other--and then the other
feeling came--the sense of selfishness, of going by on the other side;
and I tried to realize that it might have been you and I who--who were
down there in the night and the flood--"
Peyton let the whip fall on the ponies' flanks. "Upon my soul," he said
with a laugh, "you must have a nice opinion of both of us."

The words fell chillingly on the blaze of her self-immolation. Would
she never learn to remember that Denis was incapable of mounting
such hypothetical pyres? He might be as alive as herself to the direct
demands of duty, but of its imaginative claims he was robustly
unconscious. The thought brought a wholesome reaction of
thankfulness.
"Ah, well," she said, the sunset dilating through her tears, "don't you
see that I can bear to think such things only because they're
impossibilities? It's easy to look over into the depths if one has a
rampart to lean on. What I most pity poor Arthur for is that, instead of
that woman lying there, so dreadfully dead, there might have been a
girl like me, so exquisitely alive because of him; but it seems cruel,
doesn't it, to let what he was not add ever so little to the value of what
you are? To let him contribute ever so little to my happiness by the
difference there is between you?"
She was conscious, as she spoke, of straying again beyond his reach,
through intricacies of sensation new even to her exploring
susceptibilities. A happy literalness usually enabled him to strike a
short cut through such labyrinths, and rejoin her smiling on the other
side; but now she became wonderingly aware that he had been caught
in the thick of her hypothesis.
"It's the difference that makes you care for me, then?" he broke out,
with a kind of violence which seemed to renew his clutch on her wrist.
"The difference?"
He lashed the ponies again, so sharply that a murmur escaped her, and
he drew them up, quivering, with an inconsequent "Steady, boys," at
which their back-laid ears protested.
"It's because I'm moral and respectable, and all that, that you're fond of
me," he went on; "you're--you're simply in love with my virtues. You
couldn't imagine caring if I were down there in the ditch, as you say,
with Arthur?"

The question fell on a silence which seemed to deepen suddenly within
herself. Every thought hung bated on the sense that something was
coming: her whole consciousness became a void to receive it.
"Denis!" she cried.
He turned on her almost savagely. "I don't want your pity, you know,"
he burst out. "You can keep that for Arthur. I had an idea women loved
men for themselves--through everything, I mean. But I wouldn't steal
your love--I don't want it on false pretenses, you understand. Go and
look into other men's lives, that's all I ask of you. I slipped into it--it
was just a case of holding my tongue when I ought to have spoken--but
I--I--for God's sake, don't sit there staring! I suppose you've seen all
along that I knew he was married to the woman."
III
The housekeeper's reminding her that Mr. Orme would be at home the
next day for dinner, and did she think he would like the venison with
claret sauce or jelly, roused Kate to the first consciousness of her
surroundings. Her father would return on the morrow: he would give to
the dressing of the venison such minute consideration as, in his opinion,
every detail affecting his comfort or convenience quite