"Doubtless I shouldn't know her if I were to pass her in the street," he pursued, after a minute. "But it's worse than that and it's harder—for it's as many years since I saw my wife."
She had not lifted her head from the basket, and he felt suddenly that her stillness was not the stillness of flesh, but of marble.
"Perhaps I ought to have told you all this before," he went on again, "perhaps it wasn't fair to let you take me in in ignorance of this and of much else?"
Raising her head, she stood looking into his face with her kind, brown eyes.
"But how could these things possibly affect us?" she asked, smiling slightly.
"No," he replied slowly, "they didn't affect you, of course—they don't now. It made no difference to any of you, I thought. How could it make any?"
"No, it makes no difference to any of us," she repeated quietly.
"Then, perhaps, I've been wrong in telling you this to-day?"
She shook her head. "Not in telling me, but," she drew a long breath, "it might be as well not to speak of it to Beverly or Amelia—at least for a while."
"You mean they would regret their kindness?"