Mary thought that this silence was the
silence of relief; his depression she ascribed to the fact that he had
seen Katharine and parted from her, leaving her in the company of
William Rodney. She could not blame him for loving Katharine, but
that, when he loved another, he should ask her to marry him--that
seemed to her the cruellest treachery. Their old friendship and its
firm base upon indestructible qualities of character crumbled, and her
whole past seemed foolish, herself weak and credulous, and Ralph
merely the shell of an honest man. Oh, the past--so much made up of
Ralph; and now, as she saw, made up of something strange and false and
other than she had thought it. She tried to recapture a saying she had
made to help herself that morning, as Ralph paid the bill for
luncheon; but she could see him paying the bill more vividly than she
could remember the phrase. Something about truth was in it; how to see
the truth is our great chance in this world.
"If you don't want to marry me," Ralph now began again, without
abruptness, with diffidence rather, "there is no need why we should
cease to see each other, is there? Or would you rather that we should
keep apart for the present?"
"Keep apart? I don't know--I must think about it.
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