"I am going to tell you my life," she said, abruptly.
"I know it already.—How beautiful you look!"
"I ought to look hideous." She walked about for a moment or two, and finally stopped, facing him, behind the old stone seat.
"It will make no difference what you say, I can tell you that now," he said, warningly.
"I think it will make a difference. You are not cruel."
"Yes, I am."
"I never loved Lanse," she began, hurriedly. "In one way it was not my fault; I was too young to appreciate what love meant, I was peculiarly immature in my feelings—I see that now.
"When the blow came, the blow of my discovering—what Lanse has already told you, I was crushed by it,—I had never known anything of actual evil.
"He told me to 'take it as a lady should.' I didn't know what he meant.
"I had no mother to go to. I felt even then that Aunt Katrina wouldn't be kind. In the overthrow of everything, the best I could think of to do was to hold on to one or two ideas that were left—that seemed to me right, and one of these was silence; I determined to tell nobody what had really happened; I would be loyal to my husband, as far as I could be, no matter what my husband was to me.