'Oh, you ought to have told her: you ought to have asked her,' she repeated.
'Well—now you know why I went away.'
'Yes.'
'When I heard of her—her—death'—he could not bring himself to say her suicide—'there was nothing else for me to do. It was so hideous, so unutterable. To go on with my old life, in the old place, among the old people, was quite impossible. I wanted to follow her, to do what she had done. The only alternative was to fly as far from England, as far from myself, as I could.'
'Sometimes,' Mrs. Kempton confessed by-and-bye, 'sometimes I wondered whether, possibly, your disappearance could have had any such connection with Mary's death—it followed it so immediately. I wondered sometimes whether, perhaps, you had cared for her. But I couldn't believe it—it was only because the two things happened one upon the other. Oh, why didn't you tell her? It is dreadful, dreadful!'
IV.
When he had left her, she sat still for a little while before the fire.
'Life is a chance to make mistakes—a chance to make mistakes. Life is a chance to make mistakes.'
It was a phrase she had met in a book she was reading the other day: then she had smiled at it; now it rang in her ears like the voice of a mocking demon.
'Yes, a chance to make mistakes,' she said, half aloud.