They had not been gone more than five minutes when Brett rang at the door again and asked for Mrs. Darche. Stubbs looked at him for a moment, and then said that he would inquire. Brett waited in the library, by the deserted tea table, for Cousin Annie had betaken herself to her own room as soon as Dolly and Vanbrugh left, and he wondered who had been there. It was some time before Marion appeared.
"I am glad to see you again," she said, quietly, and holding out her hand. "You went away so suddenly—as though you were anxious about something."
"I am."
"And you have made me anxious, too. You were telling me that a great and final misfortune is hanging over my head. You do not know me. You do not understand me. You do not see that I would much rather know what it is, and face it, than live in terror of it and trust altogether to you to keep it from me."
"But do you not know after all these years, that you can trust me? Do you not trust me now?"
"Yes," Marion answered after a pause. "As a man, my dear friend, I trust you. You do all that a man can do. I can even give you credit, perhaps, for being able to do more than you or any other man can do. But there is more. There is something yet. Be as faithful as you may, as honest as God has made you, and as brave and as strong as you are—you cannot control fate. You do not believe in fate? I do. Well, call it that you please. Circumstances arise which none of us, not the strongest of us, can govern. Whatever this secret is, it means a fact, it means that there is something, somewhere, which might come to my knowledge, which might make me unutterably miserable, which you some day may not be able to keep from me. Does it not?"
"Yes, it does," said Brett, slowly. "I cannot deny that. You might, you may, come to know of it without my telling you."
"Then tell me now," said Marion earnestly. "Is it not far better and far more natural that this, whatever it may be, should come to me directly from you, instead of through some stranger, unawares, when I am least prepared for it, when I may break down under the shock of it? Do you not think that you, my best friend, could make it easier for me to hear, if any one could?"
"If any one could, yes," answered Brett in a low voice.
"And if no one can, then you at least can make it less cruel. Let me know now when I am prepared for it by all you have said—prepared to hear the most dreadful news that I can possibly imagine, something far more dreadful, I am sure, than anything really could be. Let me hear of it from you of all other men."