She shook her head. His eyes were piercing her; she felt them on her wherever she looked.
"Then speak and be done! 'There was another man.' What more?"
Suddenly the first fear had entered his veins, and, though he was conscious only of a vague oppression, he was already terrified by the anticipation of what he was going to hear.
"'There was another man,'" he repeated hoarsely. "What of him?"
She was leaning forward, stooping so that her face was completely hidden. With the silence that had fallen inside the church, the scene was quieter than it had been, and the stillness in the air intensified her difficulty of speech. She struggled to evolve from her confusion the phrase to express her impurity, but all the terms looked shameless and unutterable alike; and the travail continued until, faint with the tension of the pause and the violent beating of her heart, she said almost inaudibly:
"I lived with him three years."
CHAPTER X
She heard him catch his breath, and then they sat motionless for a long while, just as they had been sitting when she spoke. Now that she had wrenched the fact out, the poignancy of her suffering subsided; even by degrees she realised that, after this, her leaving the town was inevitable, and her thoughts began to concern themselves vaguely with her future. In him consciousness could never waver from the sound of what she had said. She was impure. She had known passion and shame—she herself! The landscape lost its proportion as he stared; the clouds of the sky and the hue of the distance, everything had altered—she was impure.
The laboured minutes passed; he turned and looked slowly down at her averted profile. The curve of cheek was colourless; her hands were still lying clasped on her knee. He watched her for a moment, striving to connect the woman with her words. Something seemed bearing on his brain, so that it did not feel quite near. It did not feel so alive, nor so much his own, as before the vileness of this thing was uttered.