Averse, as Dido did with gesture stern

From her false friend’s approach in Hades turn,

     Wave us away, and keep thy solitude.

—Matthew Arnold, “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853)

Silence.

They lay as if paralyzed by what they had done. Congealed in sin, frozen with delight. Charles—no gentle postcoital sadness for him, but an immediate and universal horror—was like a city struck out of a quiet sky by an atom bomb. All lay razed; all principle, all future, all faith, all honorable intent. Yet he survived, he lay in the sweetest possession of his life, the last man alive, infinitely isolated . . . but already the radioactivity of guilt crept, crept through his nerves and veins. In the distant shadows Ernestina stood and stared mournfully at him. Mr. Freeman struck him across the face ... how stone they were, rightly implacable, immovably waiting.

He shifted a little to relieve Sarah of his weight, then turned on his back so that she could lie against him, her head on his shoulder. He stared up at the ceiling. What a mess, what an inutterable mess!

And he held her a little closer. Her hand reached timidly and embraced his. The rain stopped. Heavy footsteps, slow, measured, passed somewhere beneath the window. A police officer, perhaps. The Law.

Charles said, “I am worse than Varguennes.” Her only answer was to press his hand, as if to deny and hush him. But he was a man.

“What is to become of us?”

“I cannot think beyond this hour.”

Again he pressed her shoulders, kissed her forehead; then stared again at the ceiling. She was so young now, so over-whelmed.

“I must break my engagement.”

“I ask nothing of you. I cannot. I am to blame.”

“You warned me, you warned me. I am wholly to blame. I knew when I came here ... I chose to be blind. I put all my obligations behind me.”

She murmured, “I wished it so.” She said it again, sadly. “I wished it so.”

For a while he stroked her hair. It fell over her shoulder, her face, veiling her.

“Sarah ... it is the sweetest name.”

She did not answer. A minute passed, his hand smoothing her hair, as if she were a child. But his mind was elsewhere. As if she sensed it, she at last spoke.

“I know you cannot marry me.”

“I must. I wish to. I could never look myself in the face again if I did not.”

“I have been wicked. I have long imagined such a day as this. I am not fit to be your wife.”

“My dearest—“

“Your position in the world, your friends, your . . . and she—I know she must love you. How should I not know what she feels?”

“But I no longer love her!”

She let his vehemence drain into the silence.

“She is worthy of you. I am not.”

At last he began to take her at her word. He made her turn her head and they looked, in the dim outside light, into each other’s penumbral eyes. His were full of a kind of horror; and hers were calm, faintly smiling.

“You cannot mean I should go away—as if nothing had happened between us?”

She said nothing; yet in her eyes he read her meaning. He raised himself on one elbow.

“You cannot forgive me so much. Or ask so little.”

She sank her head against the pillow, her eyes on some dark future. “Why not, if I love you?”

He strained her to him. The thought of such sacrifice made his eyes smart with tears. The injustice Grogan and he had done her! She was a nobler being than either of them.

Charles was flooded with contempt for his sex: their triviality, their credulity, their selfishness. But he was of that sex, and there came to him some of its old devious cowardice: Could not this perhaps be no more than his last fling, the sowing of the last wild oats? But he no sooner thought that than he felt like a murderer acquitted on some technical flaw in the prosecution case. He might stand a free man outside the court; but eternally guilty in his heart.

“I am infinitely strange to myself.”

“I have felt that too. It is because we have sinned. And we cannot believe we have sinned.” She spoke as if she was staring into an endless night. “All I wish for is your hap-piness. Now I know there was truly a day upon which you loved me, I can bear ... I can bear any thought ... except that you should die.”

He raised himself again then, and looked down at her. She had still a faint smile in her eyes, a deep knowing—a spiritu-al or psychological answer to his physical knowing of her. He had never felt so close, so one with a woman. He bent and kissed her, and out of a much purer love than that which began to reannounce itself, at the passionate contact of her lips, in his loins. Charles was like many Victorian men. He could not really believe that any woman of refined sensibili-ties could enjoy being a receptacle for male lust. He had already abused her love for him intolerably; it must not happen again. And the time—he could not stay longer! He sat up.

“The person downstairs . . . and my man is waiting for me at my hotel. I beg you to give me a day or two’s grace. I cannot think what to do now.............