Looking about, he noticed that her glass lamp was quite empty of oil, and that her darning basket stood beside it, full to overflowing with neatly darned and rolled socks of his own. So that was how she had spent the night, doing her best to leave him comfortable! A great lump rose in his throat. He saw, too, that both his own photograph and that of her mother were gone. She had taken them with her.
His daze began to break. He remembered phrases in Jacqueline's letter: "I didn't mean to be dishonorable ... I didn't know mother asked you to marry me ... I did him an injustice."
He went in to Kate, and demanded abruptly to know how this thing had come about.
It was a question she had been dreading, but she answered it fully and frankly, sparing herself not at all. He listened with an oddly judicial air, new in her experience of him. When she described her share in Channing's disappearance, he interrupted her quickly.
"You deceived her?"
"Yes. I know now that it was wrong."
He made no comment; but when she came to her confession to Jacqueline that it was she who had suggested their marriage and not Philip, he interrupted her again.
"Kate," he said slowly and incredulously, "you have been cruel!"
At any other time he would have noticed how her never-idle hands were shaking, the paleness of her lips, the dark shadow of pain in her eyes. But just then he was not thinking of her. He was thinking of Jacqueline.
He turned away abruptly, and looked over the portmanteau she had been packing. On the top lay the peppermint-striped silk shirt his wife had made for him. He saw it through a sudden blur of tears.