Page:Dark Hester.djvu/306

she seemed to glance at her husband with hostility. ‘All right. You think that the truth.—Sit down, Monica. I’d rather have it out, now.’ She pulled forward the chair from the dressing-table and placed it against the door and sat down, leaning back her head. ‘We’ll have it out,’ she repeated, and she stopped for a moment, controlling her thought with an effort that swept her face clear of its dark passion. ‘We must go back to the beginning,’ she said, ‘the very beginning, when Clive says I mended his life. It’s true that I helped him over his bad time. I knew how to deal with ghosts, because I’d seen so many myself; but any good psycho-analyst could have done as much. It wasn’t to mend his life that I came into it, or to be mended that Clive came to me; it was because we fell in love with each other, and when one’s in love one imagines that it’s enough and that nothing else counts and that it will carry you through.—Well, there are some things it doesn’t carry you through; and that’s what we came to find out; that’s what Clive knows as well as I do.’

She paused to think and in the pause, still keeping her son’s hand tightly held in hers, Monica sat down softly on the bed beside him. They were united as they had never yet been united. Their pulses