but she
has never been like herself since the night you went away, and we have
all known that it was her unhappiness that made her ill. She could not
get over it, and though she tried to hide it, she was worn out. She
loved you so."

He interrupted her.

"If she is dying for me," he said, hoarsely, "she must have loved me,
and if she has loved me through all this,--God help us both!"

"How could you go away and leave her all alone after all those years?"
demanded Mollie. "We cannot understand it. No one knows but Aimee, and
Dolly has told her that you were not to blame. Why did you go?"

"_You_ do not know?" he said. "You should know, Mollie, of all
others. _You_ were with her when she played that miserable coquette's
trick,--that pitiful trick, so unlike herself,--you were with her that
night when she let Gowan keep her away from me, when I waited for her
coming hour after hour. I saw you with them when he was bidding her
goodnight."

They had hidden their secret well all these months, but it was to be
hidden no longer now. It flashed upon her like an electric shock. She
remembered a hundred things,--a hundred little mysteries she had met and
been puzzled by, in Aimee's manner; she remembered all she had heard,
and all she had wondered at, and her heart seemed turned to stone. The
flush of weeping died out of her face, her hands fell and hung down
at her side, her tears were gone; nothing seemed left to her but blank
horror.

"Was it because she did not come that night, that you left her to die?"
she asked, in a labored voice. "Was it because you saw her with Ralph
Gowan--was it because you found out that she had been with him, that you
went away and let her break her heart? Tell me!"

He answered her, "Yes."

"Then," she said, turning to face him, still cold, and almost rigid, "it
is _I_ who have killed her, and not you."

"You!" he exclaimed.

She did not wait to choose her words, or try to soften the story of her
own humiliation.

"If she dies," she said, "she has died for me."

And without further preface she told him all. How she had let Gerald
Chandos flatter and gain power over her, until the climax of her folly
had been the wild, wilful escapade of that miserable long-past day.
How Ralph Gowan had discovered her romantic secret, and revealed it
to Dolly. How they had followed and rescued her; even how Dolly had
awakened her from her dangerous dream with that light touch, and had
drawn her away