“About us all—about him, principally. I can’t tell you. I really can’t.”
“About him—and my mother? That they were married and separated?”
The steady innocent eyes had waited for him to look up again. He started as he heard her words.
“You don’t mean to say that you know it too?” he cried. “Who has dared to tell you?”
“My mother—she was quite right. It’s wrong to hide such things—she ought to have told me at once. Why shouldn’t I have known it?”
“Doesn’t it seem horrible to you? Don’t you dislike me more than ever?”
“No. Why should I? It wasn’t your fault. What has it to do with you? Or with me? Is that the reason why you are going away so suddenly?”
Brook stared at her in surprise, and the dawn of returning gladness was in his face for a moment.
“We have a right to live, whatever they did in their day,” said Clare. “There is no reason why you should go away like this, at a moment’s notice.”
With an older woman he would have understood the first time, but he did not dare to understand Clare, nor to guess that there was anything to be understood.