His hands dropped wearily to his sides.
"If I hadn't been instrumental in your father's loss, if I had had the faintest hope of his ever being able to take his place in your life again, I wouldn't have asked you to be my wife. I shouldn't have dared draw you into my life. But you were lonely and unhappy—much as I was——"
"You felt guilty and you pitied me," she interrupted with feverish excitement. "I suppose you think you've sacrificed yourself. You never wanted to marry me. It was always that woman—that woman——"
"For pity's sake—don't, Anne!" he pleaded.
"Why shouldn't I? I've the right——"
"You have not the right to say that," he said sternly. "I have behaved like a fool—I have done you, as things turned, a great wrong; but I have never thought of any other woman as my wife."
"Not as your wife, perhaps," she interrupted wildly.
He turned away from her. He felt physically sick and broken. The room, with its suffocating propriety, its prim order, seemed to him an integral part of the scene's sordidness. He had only one instinct left—the thirst for the free air and the loneliness of the life to which he had belonged. She watched him in breathless silence, clasping and unclasping her thin hands. She was the more resentful because he had driven her to an outburst of which she was ashamed.
"When you found my father was going to get better, what did you expect?" she began again. "I wonder since you had gone so far—that you didn't finish your work."
A faint, bitter amusement touched his white lips.