He was silent then, as if he did not know how to continue. And she, finding her strength, leaned to him in the darkness, feeling for him, still hardly believing that it was not a dream.
He took her wandering hand and held it imprisoned. The firmness of his grasp reassured her, but it came to her that his hands were cold; and she wondered.
"I have something to say to you," he said.
She sat quite still in his hold, but it frightened her. "Where are you?" she whispered.
"I am just—kneeling by your side," he said. "Don't tremble—or be afraid! There is nothing to frighten you. Stella," his voice came almost in a whisper. "Hanani—the ayah—told you something in the ruined temple at Khanmulla. Can you remember what it was?"
"Ah!" she said. "Do you mean about—Ralph Dacre?"
"I do mean that," he said. "I don't know if you actually believed it. It may have sounded—fantastic. But—it was true."
"Ah!" she said again. And then she knew why he had turned out the lamp. It was that he might not see her face when he told her—or she his.
He went on; his hold upon her had tightened, but she knew that he was unconscious of it. It was as if he clung to her in anguish—though she heard no sign of suffering in his low voice. "I have done the utmost to keep the truth from you—but Fate has been against me all through. I sent him away from you in the first place because I heard—too late—that he had a wife in England. I married you because—" he paused momentarily—"ah well, that doesn't come into the story," he said. "I married you, believing you free. Then came Bernard, and told me that the wife—Dacre's wife—had died just before his marriage to you. That also came—too late."
He stopped again, and she knew that his head was bowed upon his arms though she could not free her hand to touch it.