‘And could you believe—in the full possession of your reason, wife—that this was meant for me?’
Dinah’s head drooped lower. She coloured violently.
‘Could you believe that Linda Thorne, a woman who has travelled over half the habitable globe alone, picking up experience everywhere—Linda, a woman of tact, a woman of the world—would commit herself to sentiment of doubtful application, set down in black and white?’
‘I never stopped to reason—the heart within me was too sore. I knew Linda Thorne had called. I saw that the envelope was directed to you.’
‘Or to Geoffrey—which? It is, as you see, addressed simply “Mr. G. Arbuthnot.”’
‘But Mrs. Thorne and Geff disliked each other. Do you think, even in jest, she would——’
‘My best Dinah—let a molehill which, during fifteen months, has been assuming gigantic size, return, forthwith, to molehill proportions? This handwriting may be Marjorie Bartrand’s. One can imagine a classico-mathematical girl making that kind of “e.” It is certainly not Linda’s.’
‘And the meaning of the solitary word “Repentance!”’
‘Ah! you must read your own riddles,’ answered Gaston, with suavity. ‘Poor Linda and myself made an innocent wager of gloves, which I won. I know no more.’
Dinah rose hastily. She turned her face away from the fire’s light. Amidst the full happiness of the last year, in her wifely rejoicing over Gaston’s progress in his art, in the flood of charity towards all men which had come upon her with the new delights of motherhood, she had always dreaded the cloud ‘no bigger than a man’s hand,’ had always remembered the secret which a jealously locked drawer of her dressing-case hid out of sight. Her moral attitude towards Gaston had perforce been a stooping one, an attitude of dumb forgiveness. Believing in the present, hoping all things for the future, it had not been possible for her wholly to forget the past. In this moment’s sharp enlightenment, this unlooked-for vindication of Gaston’s loyalty, her first sensation was one of relief. Succeeding it—so swiftly that Dinah distinguished not where relief ended and pain began—there swept across her the keenest shame which in her fair untarnished life her soul had ever known.