"I must go to him if he is ill."
"Ill—yes; that's the only thing that—" He stopped, and stood looking at her.
"I am afraid he is very ill."
"Yes, he is very ill. But I'm not thinking about Lanse now. I know everything, Margaret—everything except why you have wished, why you have been determined, that I should think of you in the way I have,—that is, with such outrageous, such cruel wrong. Lanse has told me the whole story of his leaving you, not your leaving him. And before that, Garda had told me what really happened that afternoon in the woods. Why have you treated me in this way! Why?"
Margaret, whiter than he had ever seen her, stood before him, her hands tightly clasped. She looked like a person strained up to receive a blow.
"If you could only know how I feel when I think what you have been through, and what the truth really was," Winthrop went on; "when I remember my own stupidity, and dense obstinacy, all those years. I can never atone for that, Margaret; never."
Lanse's wife put out her hand, like a person who feels her way, as she went towards the door. "Don't stop me," she said; "I cannot talk now."
Her voice was so strained and husky that he hardly knew it.
She went hastily out.