"I have never told you a falsehood," she murmured, "I didn't tell you any falsehood in London. Don't think me all deceit—every word of what I said that day was true."
"I dare say," he answered dully; "I have not accused you."
The change in his tone was pregnant with condemnation to her, and she wondered if he was believing her; but, indeed, he hardly recognised that she had said anything requiring belief. Her assurance appeared juvenile to him, incongruous. There was an air almost of unreality about their being seated here as they were, gazing at the blur of churchyard. Something never to be undone had happened and she was strange.
The service had ended, and, trooping out, the Sunday-school pupils clattered past their feet, shiny and clamorous, and eyeing them with sidelong inquisition. She rose nervously, and, rousing himself, he went with her through the crowd of children as far as the gate. There their steps flagged to a standstill, and for a few seconds they remained looking down the lane in silence.
To her, stunned by no shock to make reality less real, these final seconds held the condensed humiliation of the hour. The rigidity with which the man waited beside her seemed eloquent of disgust, and she mused bitterly on what she had done, how she had abased herself and destroyed his respect; she longed to be free of his reproachful presence. On the gravel behind them one of the bigger girls whispered to another, and the other giggled.
She made a slight movement, and he responded with something impossible to catch. She did not offer her hand; she did not immediately pity him. Had a stranger told him this thing of her, she would have pitied and understood; told him by herself, she understood only that she was being despised. They separated with a mechanical "good-afternoon," quietly and slowly. The two girls, who watched them with precocious eagerness, debated their relationship.
The road lay before him long and bare, and lethargically he took it. He continued to hear her words, "There used to be another man," but he did not know he heard them—he did not actively pursue any train of thought. It was only in momentary intervals that he became aware that he was thinking. The sense of there being something numbed within him still endured, and as yet his condition was more of stupor than of pain.
"There used to be another man!" The sentence hummed in his ears, and as he went along he awoke to it, the persistence of it touched him; and he began to repeat it—mentally, difficultly, trying to spur his mind into comprehension of it and take it in. He did not suffer acutely even then. There was nothing acute in his feelings whatever. He found it hard to realise, albeit he did not doubt. She was what she had said she was; he knew it. But he could not see her so; he could not imagine her the woman that she had said she used to be. He saw her always as she had been to him, composed and self-contained. The demeanour had been a mask, yet it clung to his likeness of her, obscuring the true identity from him still. He strove to conceive her in her past life, contemning himself because he could not; he wanted to remember that he had been loving a disguise; he wanted to obliterate it. The fact of its having been a disguise and never she all the time was so hard to grasp. He tried to look upon her laughing in dishonour, but the picture would not live; it appeared unnatural. It was the inception of his agony: the feeling that he had known her so very little that it was her real self which seemed the impossible.
And that other man had known it all—seen every mood of her, learned her in every phase!
"Mary!" he muttered; and was lost in the consciousness that actually he had never known "Mary."