She turned her eyes back to his face. She felt like a traveller on a giddy path between a cliff and a precipice: there was nothing for it now but to go on.
“Had it ... had it begun ... before you met her in Paris?”
“No; a thousand times no! I’ve told you the facts as they were.”
“All the facts?”
He turned abruptly. “What do you mean?”
Her throat was dry and the loud pulses drummed in her temples.
“I mean—about her.... Perhaps you knew ... knew things about her ... beforehand.”
She stopped. The room had grown profoundly still. A log dropped to the hearth and broke there in a hissing shower.
Darrow spoke in a clear voice. “I knew nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said.
She had the answer to her inmost doubt—to her last shameful unavowed hope. She sat powerless under her woe.