“Oh, my dear,” she said, “who ever could have dreamed of this?”
He made no answer, for there was none, but the look on his face gave her a new throb of fear.
“What is it, Jack?”
“I don’t know,” he said wearily, “but if it were not for you I would regret having done anything. As it is”—he made a helpless gesture—“see what I have done!”
“Has anything else happened?” she asked timidly.
“No, there’s nothing more to happen now. I’m thinking of Perkins down in the cottage, and that it was I who sent her there. I wish I hadn’t. God, how I wish that!”
“Jack,” she said swiftly, “don’t think of it that way! Dear one, don’t!”
“I’ve done a woman to death,” he said in a half-whisper.
“No, no”—she was trembling with a great longing to comfort him—“no one has. It was all written, and had to be. I am full of the horror of it, too, but you and all of us were only pawns. Perkins’s life was utterly unhappy, and her death, however terrible, can’t be more so. To me it all seems like some law.”
“What law?” he asked dully.