He became natural--ready to fight for this woman, though still believing that he despised everything about her except her loveliness. All at once he was like a man who stands on the edge of a chasm, who has an idea that he may be able to leap across, from a bitterness endured alone to a bitterness shared with another. He took the leap. He put her to the test. She saw him walking across the living room toward the closed doors of the study. Noiselessly, as swift as her dreadful thought, she rose, traversed the room, passed him, and whirled round against the door. She flung out her arms in a movement that nailed her against the panels as to a cross. She could not speak; but he read on her lips, as if she had cried it in his face: "No!" The music began again, at first soft and simply melodious, soon complex and thunderous. The door at her back vibrated from the sound, and the quivering penetrated her body and her brain. She was filled with a new horror, at the new, miraculous strength evinced in that playing. And again that voice exulting in the study: "Lilla? Oh, where are you?" "Come away from here," she muttered, giving Lawrence an awful stare, snatching at his sleeve, dragging him after her across the room, her feet as heavy as if fleeing through a nightmare. Now, straining at his arm, she was in the wainscotted hall before the stone mantelpiece that bore up the defiant knight. Now she reached the fernery. The palms leaped back into place behind them as she collapsed upon the red cushions of the settee. He stood watching her as before, erect, breathing, alive, even though he lay smashed in the depths of that chasm which she had prevented him from clearing. CHAPTER XLV "And your idea is," Lawrence inquired calmly, "that he mustn't know at all?" She continued to weep in silence, the tears running quickly down her cheeks and falling like brilliants upon the fur edging of her house gown. He added, "I merely mean, is it practicable?" Incoherently she started to tell the whole story over again. "But how can I make you understand? My wits are gone. He was utterly helpless, done for, you might as well say dead. All the life blazing and throbbing round him--and round me, too; for I was as good as dead also. Two dead people meeting and trying to find their way back, through each other, to some sort of life. But he didn't know that he was helping me; that is my secret. Yet it wasn't all selfishness with me. In the end I was persuaded just by pity. Have you seen a sick animal looking at you pleadingly? Pity is a monster! First one tentacle, then another, and finally one is pulled under and devoured. One should never feel pity. But you were gone." She pressed her fingers to her temples, and closed her eyes. "Don't you know this will kill him?" she asked. "But how could you know that? It's so, all the same. It's just I who have kept him alive. It's just by holding on to me that he's held on to life."