"Dying," she repeated deliberately. "Dying."
Nora clasped her hands in an agonised movement of appeal.
"I know—I have heard you. For pity's sake, tell me——"
"You need not be afraid. I shall tell you everything, to the last detail." Hildegarde seated herself again. Her clenched hand rested on the table and her eyes fixed themselves on her companion with a detestation almost violent in its intensity. "It is over a year since you became engaged to my cousin," she went on. "It is not nine months since you became his wife. It is not a long time, but it was long enough for you to ruin the best, the noblest man whom I at least have ever met. You see, I declare openly what you no doubt know and have triumphed over. I love Wolff, and I have loved him all my life. If he had made me his wife, I should have deemed myself unworthy of so much happiness, and it would have been a joy to sacrifice myself for him. No doubt you find such an idea poor and contemptible; the idea of sacrifice for those one loves is perhaps out of fashion in your country. But, be that as it may, it was an idea which served you well at the time. Because I loved him, and because his happiness was really dearer to me than anything else on earth, I gave him up to you——"
"You gave him up to me!" Nora echoed blankly.
"On the same day that he asked you to be his wife I had given him his freedom from a bond which, though it had never been openly acknowledged, was still binding on him. You did not know that?"
Nora sank down in the chair by which she had been standing. Her strength had left her; she looked broken, and there was something intensely piteous in the clasped hands upon her lap.
"How should I have known?" she asked almost inaudibly.
"You might have known," Hildegarde retorted. "You knew Wolff. He was a man of honour. He would never have yielded even to his love for you until he knew himself absolutely free."
There was a cutting significance in her tone which could not be mistaken. Nora lifted her head and met the scornful eyes with despairing resolution.