Mark had been waiting in a little dark sitting-room on a lower floor; he had not dared to follow Mabel. At last, after long hours, as it seemed, of slow torment, he heard her descending slowly, and came to meet her; she was very pale and had been weeping, but her manner was composed now.
'Let us go home,' was all she said to him, and they drove back in silence as they had come. But when they had reached their home Mark could bear his uncertainty no longer.
'Mabel,' he said, and his voice shook, 'have you nothing to say to me, still?'
She met his appealing gaze with eyes that bore no reproach, only a fixed and hopeless sadness in their clear depths.
'Yes,' she said, 'let us never speak again of—of what you have told me to-night—you must make me forget it, if you can.'
The sudden relief almost took away his breath. 'You do not mean to leave me then!' he cried impulsively, as he came towards her and seemed about to take her hand. 'I thought I had lost you—but you will not do that, Mabel, you will stay with me?'
She shrank from him ever so slightly, with a little instinctive gesture of repugnance, which the wretched man noted with agony.
'I will not leave you,' she said, 'I did mean—but that is over, you owe it to him. I will stay with you, Mark—it may not be for much longer.'
Her last words chilled him with a deadly fear; his terrible confession had escaped him before he had had time to remember much that might well have excused him, even to himself, for keeping silence then.
'My God!' he cried in his agony when she had left him, 'is that to be my punishment? Oh, not that—any shame, any disgrace but that!'