“If she is dying for me,” he said, hoarsely, “she must have loved me, and if she has loved me through all this,—God help us both!”
“How could you go away and leave her all alone after all those years?” demanded Mollie. “We cannot understand it. No one knows but Aimée, and Dolly has told her that you were not to blame. Why did you go?”
“You do not know?” he said. “You should know, Mollie, of all others. You were with her when she played that miserable coquette's trick,—that pitiful trick, so unlike herself,—you were with her that night when she let Gowan keep her away from me, when I waited for her coming hour after hour. I saw you with them when he was bidding her goodnight.”
They had hidden their secret well all these months, but it was to be hidden no longer now. It flashed upon her like an electric shock. She remembered a hundred things,—a hundred little mysteries she had met and been puzzled by, in Aimee's manner; she remembered all she had heard, and all she had wondered at, and her heart seemed turned to stone. The flush of weeping died out of her face, her hands fell and hung down at her side, her tears were gone; nothing seemed left to her but blank horror.
“Was it because she did not come that night, that you left her to die?” she asked, in a labored voice. “Was it because you saw her with Ralph Gowan—was it because you found out that she had been with him, that you went away and let her break her heart? Tell me!”
He answered her, “Yes.”
“Then,” she said, turning to face him, still cold, and almost rigid, “it is I who have killed her, and not you.”
“You!” he exclaimed.
She did not wait to choose her words, or try to soften the story of her own humiliation.
“If she dies,” she said, “she has died for me.”