He sank back, incredulous, dumbfounded. "My God! Am I to understand that you—that you were never married to my father?"
"Yes. I waited twenty years for him to ask me to marry him,—but he never did."
He was still somewhat stupefied. The disclosure was so unexpected, so utterly at odds with all his understanding that he could not wholly grasp its significance. Somewhat footlessly he burst out:
"But surely you must have demanded—I mean, did you never ask him to—to marry you?"
Her eyebrows went up slightly.
"How could I?" she inquired, as if surprised by the question. "I had not sunk so low in my own estimation as that, Kenneth Gwynne. My bed was made the day I went away with him. Some day you may realize that even such as I may possess the thing called pride. No! I would have died rather than ask him to marry me. I chose my course with my eyes open. It was not for me to demand more than I gave. He was not a free man when I went to him. He made no promises, nor did I exact any."
She spoke in the most matter-of-fact way. He regarded her in sheer wonder.
"But he SHOULD have made you his wife," he exclaimed, his sense of fairness rising above the bitter antipathy he felt toward her.
"That was for him to decide," said she, calmly. "I respected his feelings in the matter,—and still do. He had no right to marry me when we went away together. He did not take me as a wife, Kenneth Gwynne. He took me as a woman. He had a wife. Up to the day he died he looked upon her as his wife. I was his woman. I could never take her place. Not even after she had been in her grave for twenty years. He never forgot her. I see the scorn in your eyes. He does not quite deserve it, Kenneth. After all is said and done, he was fair to me. Not one man in a thousand would have done his part so well as he.
"I don't suppose you know what men do with their mistresses when they begin to feel that they are through with them and there is no legal bond to hold them. They desert them. They cast them off. And then they turn to some honest woman and marry her. That is the way with men. But he was not like that. I can tell what you are about to say. It is on your lips to say that he deserted an honest woman. Well, so he did. And therein lies the secret of his constancy to me,—even after he had ceased to love me and the passion that was in him died. He would never desert another woman who trusted him. He paid too dearly in his conscience for the first offence to be guilty of a second.