The words stung him beyond endurance. He rose and leaned across the table towards her.
"At least I recognized what I had done, what you had done, and I tried to face it. I did not disguise it. My letter to you proves that. But nevertheless I was true to you. I did not deceive you—ever. I loved you—ah, I loved you as few women have been loved! ... But you, you might have made a mistake where Rudyard was concerned, made the mistake once, but if you wronged him, you wronged me infinitely more. I was ready to give up all, throw all my life, my career, to the winds, and prove myself loyal to that which was more than all; or I was willing to eliminate myself from the scene forever. I was willing to pay the price—any price—just to stand by what was the biggest thing in my life. But you were true to nothing—to nothing—to nobody."
"If one is untrue—once, why be true at all ever?" she said with an aching laugh, through which tears ran, though none dropped from her eyes. "If one is untrue to one, why not to a thousand?"
Again a mocking laugh burst from her. "Don't you see? One kiss, a wrong? Why not, then, a thousand kisses! The wrong came in the moment that the one kiss was given. It is the one that kills, not the thousand after."
There came to her mind again—and now with what sardonic force—Rudyard's words that day before they went to Glencader: "If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand lovers."
"And so it is all understood between you and Rudyard," she added, mechanically. "That is what you have arranged for me—that I go on living as before with Rudyard, while I am not to know from him anything has happened; but to accept what has been arranged for me, and to be repentant and good and live in sackcloth. It has been arranged, has it, that Rudyard is to believe in me?"
"That has not been arranged."
"It has been arranged that I am to live with him as before, and that he is to pretend to love me as before, and—"
"He does love you as before. He has never changed. He believed in you, was so pitifully eager to believe in you even when the letter—"
"Where is the letter?"