It was a long time before she looked up at him.
"Why did he do it?" she whispered.
"Have you never guessed?" he asked in his turn. "I will tell you, Mrs. Lightmark. I was with him when he was dying. He wished you to know; he had some such time as this in his mind. It was a sort of message."
"He wished me to know—a sort of message," she repeated blankly. "He spoke of me, then—he forgave me for my hard judgement, for knowing him so ill?"
"It was himself that he did not forgive for not having guarded you better, for having been deceived by your husband. He spoke of you to me very fully at the last when we both saw that his death was merely a question of days. I saw then what I had sometimes suspected before, that you had absorbed his whole life, that his devotion to you was a kind of religion."
"He loved me?" she asked at last, in a hushed, strange voice, white to the lips.
Oswyn bowed his head.
"Ever since you were a child. It was very beautiful, and it was with him at the last as a light. Don't reproach yourself; it was to prevent that that he wished you to be told."
"To prevent it!" she cried, with tragical scorn. "Am I not to reproach myself that I was hard and callous and cold; that I never understood nor cared; that I was not with him? Not reproach myself? Oh, Philip, Philip!" she called, breaking down utterly, laying her face in her hands.
Oswyn averted his eyes, giving her passion time to appease itself. When he glanced at her again, she had gathered her cloak round her, was standing by the picture from which she seemed loath to remove her eyes.