Yet there was something lofty and grand about such loneliness as his. She could not but feel that, now that she knew all. She thought of him as she sat beside him in the monumental silence of the enormous sepulchre, and she guessed of depths in his soul like the deepness of the shadows above her and before her and around her.
"My suffering seems very small, compared with yours," she said softly, almost to herself.
Somehow she knew that he would understand her, though perhaps her knowledge was only hope.
"Why should you suffer at all?" he asked. "You have never done anything wrong. Nothing, of all this, is your fault. It was all fatal, from the first, and you cannot blame yourself for anything that has happened."
"I do," she answered, in a low voice. "Indeed I do."
"You are wrong. You are not to blame. Dalrymple was—Maria Braccio—I—Gloria—we four. But you! What have you done? Compared with us you are a saint on earth!"
She hesitated a moment before she spoke. Then her voice came in a broken way.
"I loved Angelo Reanda. I know it, now that I have lost him."
Griggs barely heard the last words, but he bent his head gravely, and said nothing in answer.