stammered foolishly, and took her hand and pleaded with her, not knowing what he was saying, and sick with guilt and shame and horror at the profanation of his act.
Her breath was fluttering, coming uncertainly, panting short and quick and breathless like a frightened child; this and her slender hands, her long trembling fingers, the sight of her hands so strangely, beautifully delicate for such a big woman, filled him with an unspeakable anguish of remorse. She began to speak, a breathless, panting, desperate kind of speech, and he found himself desperately agreeing with everything she said, even though he did not hear or understand half of it!
“… Mustn’t stay here,” she panted. “Let’s get out of here… go somewhere… anywhere… I’ve got to talk to you…. Something I’ve got to tell you!” she panted desperately. “… You don’t understand… awful, horrible mistake!” she muttered. “… Got to tell you, now!… Come on! Let’s go.”
“Oh, yes—sure—anywhere, Ann. Wherever you say,” he agreed eagerly to everything she said: they put on their hats and coats with trembling haste, and were preparing to leave just as Starwick and Elinor returned.
Starwick asked them where they were going: they said they were going for a walk. He said, “Oh!” non-committally. Both he and Elinor observed their flushed, excited manner, and trembling haste, with a curious and rather perturbed look, but said nothing more, and they departed.
The pension was silent: everyone had already gone to bed, and when they got out into the street it was the same. It was a night of still, cold frost, and everywhere around them there were the strange, living presences of silence and of sleep. The houses had the closed, shuttered and attentive secrecy that houses in a small French town have at night, no one else seemed to be abroad: they strode rapidly along in the direction of the railway station, saying nothing for a time, their feet sounding sharply on the frozen ground as they walked.
At length, beneath one of the sparse, infrequent street lamps, Ann paused, turned to him, and in a rapid, excited tone which was so different from her usual sullen curtness, began to speak:
“Look here!” she said, “we’ve got to forget about all that tonight—about everything that happened!… It was my fault,” she muttered, with a kind of dumb, spinsterly agony of conscience which, in its evocation of the straight innocence and integrity of her kind and person, was somehow
