'I ought to have come to see you before this,' Wilfrid continued, taking the seat to which she pointed, whilst she also sat down. 'I could not.'
'I have been expecting you,' Beatrice said, in an emotionless way.
The nervous tension with which he had come into her presence had yielded to a fit of trembling. Coldness ran along his veins; his tongue refused its office; his eyes sank before her gaze.
'I felt sure you would come to-day,' Beatrice continued, with the same absence of pronounced feeling. 'If not, I must have gone to your house. What do you wish to say to me?'
'That which I find it very difficult to say. I feel that after what happened on Monday we cannot be quite the same to each other. I fear I said some things that were not wholly true.'
Beatrice seemed to be holding her breath. Her face was marble. She sat unmoving.
'You mean,' she said at length, 'that those letters represented more than you were willing to confess?'
It was calmly asked. Evidently Wilfrid had no outbreak of resentment to fear. He would have preferred it to this dreadful self-command.
'More,' he answered, 'than I felt at the time. I spoke no word of conscious falsehood.'
'Has anything happened to prove to you what you then denied?'