He wondered sometimes what had become of Eleanor Wakefield. There was no trace of her in her old lodgings, and the editor told him that she had sent him no more contributions. She had seemed to Ralph a noble woman, a woman whom he might love on an equal footing, with all trust and reverence, without pity or forbearance. And she had failed him strangely and meanly, so that the sting of her offence had not yet left him entirely; but it troubled him a little to remember that she had made no defence. This had put him in the wrong, and made him wonder what her defence could be.
It was in the dusk of evening that he stepped into a railway carriage, which had only one occupant. It was a third-class carriage, for he had not yet adopted the ways of a prosperous man. The lady who was seated at the farther end did not move at his entrance, and it was only when he had been in his place some minutes that something in her intense stillness attracted his attention. She had desired him to forget her presence, or not to notice it, but the effort defeated itself, and his first half-curious, half-unconscious glance at her made him rise and cross to her side.
"Mrs. Wakefield!" he said.
"Yes," she answered, "it is Mrs. Wakefield." Then she added, quietly, "I should like, if I may, to congratulate you on your great success."
"You may spare me your congratulations. My success is built on my great unhappiness. None should know that better than you."
"Is it not so with many people?" she asked, gently, ignoring his last remark. "But some are unhappy without success."
He looked at her more attentively. She was in mourning, and she was much changed. The passive attitude of her hands on her lap told him this, as well as the tone of her voice.
"You never followed up your success," he remarked. "Mr. Blakely told me that he expected great things of you."
She answered him nothing.
"Mrs. Wakefield," he went on, vaguely hurt by her silence, which tormented him with an impression of his own cruelty, "I want to apologise to you for what I said when we last met. It was too much."
"It was not too much. I have said more to myself before and since. And yet," she said, turning her eyes full upon him," I do not ask you to forgive me, because I do not repent. I would do it again, if the past came back to me. It is right that you should know how evil I am. I do not repent. I would do it again. Yet I hate myself for doing it. Besides," she added, in a lower tone, which she could hardly have meant him to hear, "it spoilt my happiness as well as yours."
"I do not understand," he said.
"Why should you understand?" she answered. "It does not matter."
The train was whirling on in the darkness. The noise of its rush, the flashing of lights in the city they were leaving, seemed to increase the solitude these two, who were so near, yet so far apart; so much akin in spirit, and so hopelessly estranged.
"If it had been for fame," he said, "I could have understood the temptation better. It would have been a higher sort of temptation. But you did not even sign the story, and you have not republished it."
"I hoped," she said, "that it would be little read and soon forgotten. You had gone away for a long time. I thought that you would never see it. And no one else could ever guess where I got it from."
"You made it very clever," he replied. "I wonder, having gone so far, that you go no further."
"I shall never write again," she answered. "I have no motive. And what I did write has cost me too much."
He did not understand her; he had not known of her past poverty, nor of her recent loss. But he went on to say, "When I look at you it seems impossible to believe that you did such a thing without a reason. It may have seemed a little thing to you, but it was so much to me."
"I knew how much," she answered; "I knew all the meanness of what I did, the treachery of it, and that it would hurt you if you knew, but I thought that you would never know."
"And you did not love me," he added; but he was watching her keenly as he spoke.
Her eyes flashed upon him for a moment. "Oh," she said, "it was because I loved you that I could not help doing it. If I could have escaped from the memory of what you told me, and have thought of other things instead, it would never have been written. If only I could have forgotten you!"
He was startled and astonished. He caught her hands and then let them go again.
