As she spoke she stopped, and he followed her example. They stood facing one another now, as he replied gravely,
"Whatever you ask—let it be what it will—I will answer, truthfully." A pause before the last word perhaps betrayed a momentary struggle.
"What right have I? Why should you?"
"The right my—my desire to have your regard gives you. How can I ask for that, unless I am ready to tell you all you can wish to know?"
"I have heard," she began falteringly, "I have been told by—by people who, I suppose, were right to tell me——"
In a moment he understood her. A slight twitch of his mouth betrayed his trouble, but he came to her rescue.
"I don't know how it reached you," he said. "Perhaps I think you might have been—you need not have known it. But there is only one thing you can have heard, that it would distress you to speak of."
She said nothing, but fixed her eyes on his.
"I am right?" he asked. "It is about—my wife?"