She paused, and Thurston instantly said, "As my wife you would have tried—and succeeded."
"Perhaps," she answered, very low of tone, not meeting his look. "But all that is past. Don't pull corpses out of graves."
"My love for you is living," he said to her. There was no touch of passion in his voice; there was only a mournful respect. "I don't think I am wrong to speak of it now. There's a sanctity and chastity about the feeling I bear for you which the fact of your being a wife does not affect. I want to know the man whom you have married; I am curious to meet him and know him well. He has a large publicity, as you are aware. They have heard of him in Europe."
"I understand the question you wish to put yet do not," Claire said, at this point. "You lead up to it very adroitly; I might play the rôle of ignorant innocence, if I chose. But I do not choose. You want to ask me whether I loved the man I married."
Thurston again stroked his mustache, for a moment. "Yes," he presently said, "I should like to know that."
A silence now ensued between them. Claire broke it. "He loved me," she said.
"Which means that you did not care for him?"
"Oh, yes. I cared very much. It was no worldly sale of myself. He was not even rich when I married him. He attracted me—in a manner charmed me. I felt that I should never meet another man who would attract and charm me more. Do you understand?"
"Thoroughly.... Since then you have met Stuart Goldwin. I know him well. He is a man of exceptional fascination. They tell me that he is your slave."
"Do they?" said Claire, coloring under this rapid attack of candor. "Well, if he is my slave—which I, of course, deny—then I am not his. They did not tell you that, I am sure. They did not even hint it."