Her tears were flowing again, but a sort of serenity had fallen on her now.
“Forgive me,” she whispered. “I tried to keep it to myself—”
“You could not keep it; you ought never to have kept it so long; the finger of God Himself ought to have burnt it out of you.”
He spoke harshly, and she felt pain; but there was a secret joy as well.
“I am ruining you, Philip,” she said, leaning over him.
“We are both drifting to ruin, Katherine,” he answered hoarsely. He was an abandoned hulk, with anchorage gone and no hand at the helm—broken, blind, rolling to destruction.
“I can offer you nothing, Kate, nothing but a hidden life, a life in the dark. If you come to me you will leave a husband who worships you for one to whom your life can never be joined. You will exchange a life of respect by the side of a good man for a life of humiliation, a life of shame. How can it be otherwise now? It is too late, too late!”
Kate goes, and Pete crushes his grief to defend her honour. The lies he invents, that she has gone to visit his uncle in Liverpool, the letters he writes to himself, purporting to have come from her, the wiles he practises to deceive the neighbours—all intensify his terrible sorrow.
“A letter for you, Mr Quilliam.”