“For years—years,” he said, “he hid a secret.” Miss Amory bent forward. She felt she must help him a little—for pity’s sake.
“Was it the secret of Margery?” she half whispered.
“Did you know it?”
“When a woman has spent a long life alone, thinking—thinking,” she answered, “she has had time to learn to observe and to work at problems. The day she fainted in the street and I took her home in my carriage, I began to fear—to guess. She was not only a girl who was ill—she was a child who was being killed with some horror; she was heart-breaking. I used to go and see her. In the end I knew.”
“I—did not,” he said, looking at her with haggard eyes.
There was a long pause. She knew he had told her all in the one sentence—all she had guessed.
“She did not know I knew,” she went on, presently. “She believed no one knew. Oh, I tell you again, she was heart-breaking! She did not know that there were wild moments when she dropped words that could be linked into facts and formed into a chain.”
“Had you formed it,” he asked, “when you wrote and told me she had died?”
“Yes. It had led me to you—to nothing more. I felt death had saved her from what would have been worse. It seemed as if—the blackest devil—would be glad to know.”
“I am the blackest devil, perhaps,” he said, with stony helplessness, “but when I received your letter I was grovelling on my knees praying that I might get back to her—and atone—as far as a black devil could.”