"To write to you. I had something to tell you--and--and I did not know whether I should ever see you again!"
For an instant the table against which Geoffrey Ludlow stood seemed to spin away under his touch, and the whole room reeled. A deadly faintness crept over him, but he shook it off with one great effort, and said in a very low tone, "I scarcely understand you--please explain."
She must have had the nature of a fiend to look upon that large-souled loving fellow, stricken down by her words as by a sudden blow, and with his heart all bleeding, waiting to hear the rest of her sentence. She had the nature of a fiend, for through her set teeth she said calmly and deliberately:
"I say I did not know whether I should ever see you again. That cab is detained by me to take me away from this house, to which I ought never to have come--which I shall never enter again."
Geoff had sunk into a chair, and clutching the corner of the table with both hands, was looking up at her with a helpless gaze.
"You don't speak!" she continued; "and I can understand why you are silent. This decision has come upon you unexpectedly, and you can scarcely realise its meaning or its origin. I am prepared to explain both to you. I had intended doing so in a letter, which I should have left behind me; but since you are here, it is better that I should speak."
The table was laid for dinner, and there was a small decanter of sherry close by Geoff's hand. He filled a glass from it and drank it eagerly. Apparently involuntarily, Margaret extended her hand towards the decanter; but she instantly withdrew it, and resumed:
"You know well, Geoffrey Ludlow, that when you asked me to become your wife, I declined to give you any answer until you had heard the story of my former life. When I noticed your growing interest in me--and I noticed it from its very first germ--I determined that before you pledged yourself to me--for my wits had been sharpened in the school of adversity, and I read plainly enough that love from such a man as you had but one meaning and one result,--I determined that before you pledged yourself to me you should learn as much as it was necessary for you to know of my previous history. Although my early life had been spent in places far away from London, and among persons whom it was almost certain I should never see again, it was, I thought, due to you to explain all to you, lest the gossiping fools of the world might some day vex your generous heart with stories of your wife's previous career, which she had kept from you. Do you follow me?"
Geoffrey bowed his head, but did not speak.
"In that story I told you plainly that I had been deceived by a man under promise of marriage; that I had lived with him as his wife for many months; that he had basely deserted me and left me to starve,--left me to die--as I should have died had you not rescued me. You follow me still?"