For a moment, she was paralysed at the sight of the doctor's ghastly pallor and startled eyes as they lighted upon the stranger's face.
"You?" he breathed through stiffened lips.
"Yes, Brian. I was given the chance as Nurse Grey was ill. I had to see you again!" her voice was fiercely agitated. "Won't you hear me?"
"Good God! Don't you understand that you are nothing to me?—less than nothing!" His eyes blazed.
"Yet you never divorced me! That gave me hope. Have you no forgiveness? No pity?"
A stony silence.
"Oh, you are hard!—hard! It is not fair to punish any one forever for one mistake——"
"Mistake, do you call it?"
"Sin, if you will have it. Are you sinless? After all, we are but human, and we forgive as we hope to be forgiven." She made a movement as if to fall at his feet, and Honor rushed blindly from the room. Her one instinct was to get away somewhere and hide—hide from the knowledge so ruthlessly thrust upon her. It was too horrible to contemplate. She shuddered from head to foot, and shivered as with ague. Out into the open she ran, among the dust-laden crotons and azaleas, and the florid shrubberies of the Indian garden, now bathed in soft moonlight. Scarcely heeding her footsteps, she stumbled to a bench beneath a laburnum. If it harboured reptiles, she was indifferent. Let her be bitten and die! She was crushed and bowed to the earth with a burden of grief too great to endure,—too hopeless to think upon.
What was it that he had offered her? Had he meant to insult her?