last encounter
he had anticipated this scene; his fancy had been almost continuously
busy in fashioning this scene. And now the reality had swept down upon
him with no warning, and he was overwhelmed.

She would not speak. She had withdrawn her gaze, but she would not
speak. She would force him to speak.

"I say," he began gruffly, in a resentful tone, careless as to what he
was saying, "you might have told me earlier what you told me on
Wednesday night. Why didn't you tell me when I was at Brighton?"

"I wanted to," she said meekly. "But I couldn't. I really couldn't
bring myself to do it."

"Instead of telling me a lie," he went on. "I think you might have
trusted me more than that."

"A lie?" she muttered. "I told you the truth. I told you he was in
prison."

"You told me your husband was in prison," he corrected her, in a voice
meditative and judicial. He knew not in the least why he was talking in
this strain.

She began to cry. At first he was not sure that she was crying. He
glanced surreptitiously, and glanced away as if guilty. But at the next
glance he was sure. Her eyes glistened behind the veil, and tear-drops
appeared at its edge and vanished under her chin.

"You don't know how much I wanted to tell you!" she wept.

She hid her half-veiled face in her hands. And then he was victimised
by the blackest desolation. His one desire was that the scene should
finish, somehow, anyhow.

"I never wrote to you because there was nothing to say. Nothing!" She
sobbed, still covering her face.

"Never wrote to me--do you mean--"

She nodded violently twice. "Yes. Then!" He divined that suddenly she
had begun to talk of ten years ago. "I knew you'd know it was because I
couldn't help it." She spoke so indistinctly through her emotion and
her tears, and her hands, that he could not distinguish the words.

"What do you say?"

"I say I couldn't help doing what I did. I knew you'd know I couldn't
help it. I couldn't write. It was best for me to be silent. What else
was there for me to do except be silent? I knew you'd know I couldn't
help it. It was a--" Sobs interrupted her.

"Of course I knew that," he said. He had to control himself very
carefully, or he too would have lost command of his voice. Such was her
power of suggestion over him that her faithlessness seemed now scarcely
to need an excuse.

(Somewhere within himself he smiled as he reflected that he, in his
fathe