And now you must listen to my confession."
"Don't say a word," said Lingard in an untroubled voice and never taking
his eyes from her face. "I know already."
"You can't," she cried. Her hand slipped off his shoulder. "Then why
don't you throw me into the sea?" she asked, passionately. "Am I to live
on hating myself?"
"You mustn't!" he said with an accent of fear. "Haven't you understood
long ago that if you had given me that ring it would have been just the
same?"
"Am I to believe this? No, no! You are too generous to a mere sham. You
are the most magnanimous of men but you are throwing it away on me.
Do you think it is remorse that I feel? No. If it is anything it is
despair. But you must have known that--and yet you wanted to look at me
again."
"I told you I never had a chance before," said Lingard in an unmoved
voice. "It was only after I heard they gave you the ring that I felt the
hold you have got on me. How could I tell before? What has hate or love
to do with you and me? Hate. Love. What can touch you? For me you stand
above death itself; for I see now that as long as I live you will never
die."
They confronted each other at the southern edge of the sands as if
afloat on the open sea. The central ridge heaped up by the winds masked
from them the very mastheads of the two ships and the growing brightness
of the light only augmented the sense of their invincible solitude
in the awful serenity of the world.
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