ushioned bench which stood behind the writing-table
and Stella sat down at his side.

"When we parted--that morning--it was in the drawing-room over there in
my cottage. We parted, you to your work of getting on, Henry, I to think
of you getting on without me at your side. There was a letter lying on
the table, a letter from India. Jane Repton had written it and she asked
me to go out to her for the cold weather. I went. I was a young girl,
lonely and very unhappy, and as young girls often do who are lonely and
very unhappy I drifted into marriage."

"I see," said Thresk in a hushed voice. The terrible conviction grew upon
him now, lurid as the breaking of a day of storm, that the cowardice he
had shown on Bignor Hill ruined her altogether and hurt him not at all.
"Yes, I see. There my share begins."

"Oh no. Not yet," she answered. "Then I spoke when I should have kept
silence. I let my heart go out when I should have guarded it. No, I
cannot blame you."

"You have the right none the less."

But Stella would not excuse herself now and to him by any subtlety
or artifice.

"No: I married. That was my affair. I was
beaten--despised--ridiculed--terrified by a husband who drank secretly
and kept all his drunkenness for me. That, too, was my affair. But I
might have gone on. For seven years it had lasted. I was settling into a
dull habit of misery. I might have gone on being bullied and tortured had
not one little thing happened to push me over the precipice."

"And what was that?" asked Thresk.

"Your visit to me at Chitipur," she replied, and the words took his
breath away. Why, he had travelled to Chitipur merely to save her. He
leaned forward eagerly but she anticipated him. She smiled at him with an
indulgent forgiveness. "Oh, why did you come? But I know."

"Do you?" Thresk asked. Here at all events she was wrong.

"Yes. You came because of that one weak soft spot of sentimentalism there
is in all of you, the strongest, the hardest. You are strong for years.
You live alone for years. Then comes the sentimental moment and it's we
who suffer, not you."

And deep in Thresk's mind was the terror of the mistakes people make in
ignorance of each other, and of the mortal hurt the mistakes inflict. He
had misread Stella. Here was she misreading him and misreading him in
some strange way to her peril and ruin.

"You are sure of that?" he asked. She had no doubt--no more doubt than he
had had of the reason why she