Page:Neith Boyce--The bond.djvu/395

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THE BOND
393

"You issue your commands as though I had nothing to do but obey."

"It isn't a question of commands and obeying. It's a question of seeing a clear situation, recognising what it means to me and to you … and I'm not sure, even if you do recognise it, that I can ever trust you again. I can't feel toward you as I did before. You'll always be different—less mine than you were … I can't understand how you could do this …"

"And you? You keep the full right to do exactly as you choose, yourself? You won't recognise any responsibility in what has happened …"

"The question is entirely different for me and you you know it must be so. If I made a mistake I paid for it, long before this, and now you have made me pay a thousand times over. But you'll have to pay too, inevitably. If you were trying for revenge——!"

"No, it wasn't quite so crude as that! But perhaps it was inevitable, too, that you should suffer for what you made me suffer——"

"You suffer? You didn't, you didn't really care deeply——"

"Oh, didn't I! Didn't I! Do you believe that, Basil? I had no idea of making you pay, though. I had impulses to hurt you, I hated you sometimes, but I never deliberately meant to make you suffer—but perhaps you ought to, for what you