“Mr. Wingfield,” she said, “you have the highest form of brain power, let me tell you—the power to see in a single glance what most other men would require to have explained to them, and even then not be able to grasp properly. You saw in a moment that I was not the sort of girl who would try to affect the part of the bereaved widow, taking all the circumstances of the bereavement into consideration.”
He looked at her in frank admiration for some moments; then he said:
“It’s you that have the brains, to see that that is just what I saw. I knew in a moment that you would not put on a woebegone air when you know what everybody else knows, that you have only cause to feel delighted.”
“Not exactly——”
“I beg your pardon; of course not delighted—a man’s a man—you couldn’t feel delighted to hear of the death of any man, even though he was as great a rascal as the fellow who did his best to drag you down to hell with him. If he had cared the merest scrap for you he never would have asked you to marry him—he would have run away to the other end of the world or cut his throat first.”
“Yes; but he’s dead now.”
“Yes, I know; de mortuis and the rest; and so no one should speak a word against Judas Iscariot. A kiss—a kiss was the sign of the betrayal.”
There was a suggestion of fierceness in the way he spoke, but nothing that approached the passion with which she flared up, “He never kissed me—never once!” she cried, her face flushing and her hands trembling visibly. Her collie, who had been running ahead, turned and came back to her. He looked up at her and then glanced, enquiringly, at the man. She laid one trembling hand on the dog’s head, and then seemed to calm herself. “Pardon me,” she said, “you really did not suggest—but you had every right to take it for granted that we had been lovers—that I had some regard for him. It is as great a crime for a woman to marry a man without caring for him in the least as it is for the man to marry her. I deserved all that I suffered; but I was spared, thank God, the memory of having had so much as one kiss from him. I never told him that I had any regard for him; but I did say that perhaps one day I might come to have some sort of feeling for him, but till then—I wonder if anything like this ever happened before. It’s funny, isn’t it?”
“Funny? No. If any one else told me of it, I would think it funny; but when I look at you, I don’t think anything of the sort.”
“It is funny, and what’s funnier still is that you are the first person whom I have told this to. Now, why should I tell it to you?”