"You must hear from the beginning. If I'd ever thought this would happen, I'd have gone long ago. But it came like a thief, Dinah."
"Same with me. Go on—tell why not—quick."
"I'm married," he said.
She bent her head and leant back and shut her eyes.
"That's the only thing that could come between you and me. I'm married. It's a mad tale, and I was the madman, so most people said. Maybe you will, too; maybe you won't. I shall know in a minute. Yet, if I thought what I was going to say would make you hate me, I wouldn't say it. But it won't do that."
She was looking at him with wet eyes.
"How could I hate you? Love's love. I'd see a way to love you through it if you killed her."
"When I went into the world after father died, I was took by a relation of my mother's at Barnstaple, you must know; and there was that in me that made for getting on. I done very well, and when my mother's sister, who had a little dairy, found the sort I was, she reckoned to do me a good turn and suit herself also. By twenty years old I knew the business inside out and all that goes to it; and when I was twenty-one, my aunt, who was a widow, bargained with me to let her go out and drop the shop and be paid a regular income for her lifetime. When she died I was to have all. It worked very well for a year and a half, and I found I'd got a turn for the business, and opened out a bit, and bought a few cows for myself and even had thoughts of going higher up into the middle of the town and starting a bigger place and having a department for teas and refreshments and so on.
"But that wanted a woman, and then, just at the right moment as it seemed, a woman came along—the very woman on all the earth for the business. It looked as if Providence was out on my side and nothing could go wrong."
"You loved her?"