love, to bring peace to her tormented spirit somehow, to do anything, use his life in any way that would give her a little peace and comfort.
And he kept holding her, patting her on the shoulders, saying foolishly over and over again, and not knowing what he said:
“Oh, it’s all right!… It’s all right, Ann!… You mustn’t look like this, you mustn’t act this way… it’s going to be all right!” And knowing miserably, horribly, that it was not all right, that the whole design and fabric of their lives were ruinously awry, that there was a hurt too deep ever to heal, a wrong too cruel, fatal, and perverse ever to be righted.
She stayed there in his arms, she turned her face into his shoulder, she put her slender, strong and lovely hands upon his arms and held on to him desperately, and there, in the frozen, sleeping stillness of that street in a little French town, she wept hoarsely, bitterly, dreadfully, like some great creature horribly wounded; and all he could do was hold on to her until the last torn cry of pain had been racked and wrenched out of her.
When it was all over, and she had grown quiet, she dried her eyes, and looking at him with a dumb, pleading expression, she whispered miserably:
“You won’t tell them? You won’t say anything to Frank about this, will you? You’ll never let him know?”
And stabbed again by wild, rending pity, sick with horror at her devastating terror, he told her he would not.
They walked home in silence through the frozen, sleeping streets. It was after midnight when they got back to the pension: the whole house was long ago asleep. As they went up the stairs a clock began to strike.
LXXXVII
He did not see her the next morning until it was time for lunch. She had gone out early with the big Alsatian dog, and had spent the morning walking in the forest. During the morning he told Elinor and Starwick that he was going back to Paris. Starwick said nothing at all, but Elinor, after a moment’s silence, said coldly, and with a trace of sarcasm:
“Very well, my dear. You’re the doctor. If the lure of the great city has
