"I promise. You may trust me."
"Thank you, sir. Before I say more, will you tell me if you still love your wife?"
His face hardened and his eyes narrowed.
"Pardon me, madam. I did not come here to be catechised."
"If you have ceased to love her, then I should betray a holy trust by lifting a very sacred veil. I can speak freely only to a man who loves her as she deserves—and as I have always believed you did. If you no longer love her, I have come on worse than a fool's errand."
There was a brief silence, and hot tears ran over the little woman's cheeks.
"And if I love her still? Go on, go on."
"Then why are you breaking her dear heart?"
"Madam, her heart has never been in my keeping. You must know that for years I made every effort to win it, and failing, I abandoned the hope. Our merely nominal relation was dissolved by mutual consent, and I gave her entire freedom before I started North. I have never been close enough to her heart to wound it."
"Please, Mr. Herriott, listen to me patiently. I must go back so far. She did not love you when she married you. Why she so suddenly took that awful step I don't know. She refused to explain. I believed that her father had persuaded her, but she assured me he had no knowledge of her intention until after she had voluntarily made her decision, and she is absolutely truthful. She is reticent and proud, but of false statements she is incapable. She has never confided the motive of her rash marriage to me, and what she is unwilling to have me know, nobody else can ever tell me. Better than any one living I understand her, and when she came back with her father from Greyledge I saw a great change in her; she was not the indifferent girl whom you had taken away. The estrangement between Judge Kent and herself had ended, and she rejoiced in the cordial reconciliation, but some sad mystery in the background overshadowed her and puzzled me. The day she received that express package from you she suddenly seemed to go frantic, and her distress was so overwhelming I was frightened. Never before or since has she shown such passionate grief. She told me she had wronged, wounded you, and that you would never forgive her. How she wronged you she would not explain, and I don't know any more now than I did then. But she insisted again and again that you were not to blame—that it was entirely her fault, and she must bear the sorrow she had brought upon herself. She wrung her hands and begged me to pray she might die before you came back and rejected her. When I tried to comfort her, and asked why you should do such a cruel, unjust thing, she wailed: 'You loved your husband; if you had wounded him past pardon, could you bear to talk about it? Don't question me. Think of your Robert, and try to realize how I feel.' All that night she walked the floor of her room, and next morning she looked years older—so white, so silent, as if gazing down into a grave. Since then she has never been the same Eglah. Something in your last message, which I did not see, slew her peace of mind for all time. She shut herself away from society, lived exclusively with her father and with me. When Judge Kent died I dreaded a total collapse in the child who had worshipped him from her babyhood; but she bore the awful strain silently, calmly, surprisingly. Mr. Whitfield put his arm around her shoulder as she stood by the coffin, and, with tears in his eyes, the old man praised her devotion and her bravery. She looked up at him with a strange smile on her bloodless lips.