"Yes—yes! I think—I know! How quick you were to refer to Mrs. Carnby! She knows, of course—everybody knows—even I! Well, I don't want to criticise you or blame you. You've forced me into it by making me part of all this. Now, all I ask of you is to respect me, to leave me out of what you choose to do in future, and not to mock the name of love with this pitiful fancy for me—a fancy so trivial and so idle that it couldn't even hold you back from transgression. I ask you to go back to her, or, if you're tired of her already, at least not to come to me. I'm different from these other women, who can laugh at such things, and gloss them over, and forget them. I demand of the man who asks me to marry him the selfsame thing that he demands of me. I demand that he shall be pure!"
The girl's voice broke suddenly, and she pressed her cheek against one of the marble columns of the little arbour, battling against the insistence of her tears.
"You must forgive me," she said presently. "I have no right to speak as I have done, but—if you've guessed the reason, that is part of my humiliation and my shame. Will you go now? I want to be alone."
"How can I?" said Andrew slowly. "How can I leave you, even for an hour, while you think as you do? It would mean that all was over between us forever."
"All is over," answered Margery, "as much over as if you or I had been dead for twenty years!"
"Listen to me!" exclaimed Andrew hotly. "And you shall have the truth, if that's what you want. There is such a woman—yes! But she is no more a part of my life than that bird out there. She has been an incident, nothing more. You had only to ask me, and I would never have seen her again. You have only to ask me now—"
"Ah, stop!" broke in Margery. "Don't make me despise you!"
"Margery!" He had stumbled forward blindly into this abortive explanation, remembering for the moment nothing but his own knowledge of the truth. Now, as she checked him, a sickening sense of what his words must signify to her swept down upon him, and he covered his face with his hands.
"I don't know how to put it," he murmured. "I don't know what to say."
"You have said quite enough," replied Margery. Her voice was quite cool, quite steady now. "I have asked you once to leave me. Will you please go now—at once?"