then?"

"Yes." She had bent her head down again.

"I thought so. And I am prepared to hear it," he went on.

His voice had altered so as he brought this out that she looked up.
"What is it you expect to hear?" she asked in a whisper.

"It's a new idea, I admit--something that has just come to me; but it
explains everything--your whole course, conduct, which have been such a
mystery to me. You love Lanse, you have always loved him; that is the
solution! In spite of the insult of his long neglect of you, his second
desertion, you are glad to go back to him; there have been such cases of
miserable infatuation among women, yours is one of them. But you do not
wish _me_ to see the process of your winning him over, or trying to; so
_I_ am to be sent away."

She got up. "And if I should say yes to this, acknowledge it, that would
be the end? You would wish to see me no more?"

"Don't flatter yourself. Nothing of the kind. Recollect, if you please,
that I love you; with me, unfortunately, it's for life. You may be weak
enough--depraved enough, I might almost call it--to adore Lanse,--do you
suppose that makes any difference in my adoring you? Do you think it's a
matter of choice with me, my caring for you as I do? That I enjoy being
mastered in this way by a feeling I can't overcome?"

"I am going to tell you my life," she said, abruptly.

"I know it already.--How beautiful you look!"

"I ought to look hideous." She walked about for a moment or two, and
finally stopped, facing him, behind the old stone seat.

"It will make no difference what you say, I can tell you that now," he
said, warningly.

"I think it will make a difference. You are not cruel."

"Yes, I am."

"I never loved Lanse," she began, hurriedly. "In one way it was not my
fault; I was too young to appreciate what love meant, I was peculiarly
immature in my feelings--I see that now.

"When the blow came, the blow of my discovering--what Lanse has already
told you, I was crushed by it,--I had never known anything of actual
evil.

"He told me to 'take it as a lady should.' I didn't know what he meant.

"I had no mother to go to. I felt even then that Aunt Katrina wouldn't
be kind. In the overthrow of everything, the best I could think of to do
was to hold on to one or two ideas that were left--that seemed to me
right, and one of these was silence; I determined to tell nobody what
had really happened; I would be loyal to my husband, as far as I cou