"Shall I tell you?" I suggested.
"You couldn't possibly know."
So there were thoughts and she realized them well enough to know that I could never guess them. Well—it was something to have discovered that. And then I hazarded still further.
"You were thinking," said I, "of him in London—how handsome he is. You were calling his face back into your memory, visualizing every feature of it and trying to forget at the same time that other women might find it as handsome as you do."
She gazed at me in astonishment. So amazed was she that she could not keep it from her eyes.
"I don't think I was thinking at all," said she. "Unless I was wondering what you have got to tell me. What are you going to say? How did you know about my satin dress? Did he tell you? Do you know him?"
For a long time I looked at her, speculating upon how it were best to begin. When the God of a Thousand Circumstances takes it into his hands to break a woman's heart, he does it often by infinitely slow degrees. The mills of God, they say, grind slowly—but I was wondering whether one sudden blow were not the kindest of all. And then again, the question of my right to deliver such a blow came surging to my mind.
"It is not I who am doing it," I said to myself. "I am but one of the links of circumstances which go to make the chain of this child's existence. That night in the restaurant in London bound me into it. It's inevitable that I say what I have come to say. That we are sitting here together now, proves it. If I had imagined such a situation as this suddenly possible when first I heard that story in London, I shouldn't have hesitated. It's only because I've come to it by slow degrees that I begin questioning my right. Of course, I, myself, have no right. But then, this is not myself—this is Fate."
Wherefore, so persuading my conscience, I found determination to tell her everything.
"I want you to listen to a story," said I. "It'll hurt you to hear it. You'll have to be brave—braver even than you are when you sit all day long behind those muslin curtains, waiting and waiting and waiting for what sometimes it seems will never come to pass. I've come all the way over here to Ireland to tell it to you, and when I've finished you'll think I'm cruel—that I have got some evil motive at the back of my mind; but whatever you think of me, it's far better that you should know."