“No!” she shouted, and wrenched free with a kind of stifled sob, and started ahead, almost running: “Leave me alone now! I won’t tell you!”
A sudden flash of intuition, an instant flash of recognition and horror went through him like a knife. His heart seemed to have frozen solid, his breath to have stopped: he jumped for her like a cat, and whisking her round towards him, said:
“Ann! Look at me a moment!” He put his fingers underneath her chin and jerked her face up roughly: “Are you in love with Starwick?”
A long wailing note of dumb anguish and despair was torn from her; she tried to break from his grasp, and as she wrenched to get free, cried pitiably, in a terror-stricken voice:
“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!”
“Answer, God-damn you!” he snarled. “Is it Starwick or not?”
With a last frenzied effort, she wrenched free, and screamed like a wounded animal:
“Yes! Yes!… I’ve told you now! Are you satisfied? Will you leave me alone?” And with a sobbing breath, she began to run blindly.
He ran after her again, and caught up with her and took her in his arms, but not to embrace her, but just to hold her, stop her, somehow quiet, if he could, the wild, dumb, pitiable anguish of that big creature, which tore through the ventricles of his heart like a knife. He himself was sick with horror, and a kind of utter, paralyzing terror he had never felt before; he scarcely knew what he was doing, what he was saying, but the sight of that great, dumb creature’s anguish, that locked and inarticulate agony of grief, was more than he could bear. And cold with terror, he began to mumble with a thickened tongue: “Oh, but Ann, Ann!—Starwick, Starwick!—it’s no use! It’s no use!—Christ, what a shame! What a shame!” For suddenly he knew what Starwick was, what he had never allowed himself to admit that Starwick had become, and he kept mumbling thickly, “Christ! Christ! What a pity! What a shame!” not knowing what he was saying, conscious only, with a kind of sickening horror, of the evil mischance which had with such a cruel and deliberate perversity set their lives awry, and of the horrible waste and loss which had warped for ever this grand and fertile creature’s life and which now would bring all her strength, her love, the noble integrity of her spirit, to barren sterile nothing.
At the moment he had only one feeling, overwhelming and intolerable, somehow to quiet her, to stop, to heal this horrible wound of grief and
