‘Never mind,’ she went on. ‘What I wanted to say was, that I’m sorry that—well, you know.’
Lucian gazed at her with a sickening fear creeping closely round his heart. He had forced the truth away from him: he was to hear it at last from the lips of a dying woman.
‘You were to blame, though,’ she said presently. ‘You ought not to have let me go alone on his yacht or to the Highlands. It was so easy to go wrong there.’
Lucian could not control a sharp cry.
‘Don’t!’ he said, ‘don’t! You don’t know what you’re saying. It can’t be that—that you wrote the truth in that letter? It was—hallucination.’
She looked at him out of dull eyes.
‘I want you to say you forgive me,’ she said. ‘The priest—he said I ought to ask your forgiveness.’
Lucian bowed his head.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I forgive all you wish. Try not to think of it any more.’
He was saying over and over to himself that she was still disordered of mind, that the sin she was confessing was imaginary; but deeper than his insistence on this lay a dull consciousness that he was hearing the truth. He stood watching her curiously. She suddenly looked up at him, and he saw a strange gleam in her eyes.