"I am very sorry you are obliged to go," she said.
"For God's sake do not lie to me. For pity's sake let there be no pretending."
He took both her hands and drew her to him, looking at her with an imploring earnestness.
"I have trusted you as men seldom trust their wives," he said. "I thought I had done you a great wrong when I took you in the first bloom of your young beauty and made you my own; cutting you off for ever from the love of a young lover, and all the passion and romance of youth. Considering this, I tried to make amends by giving you perfect freedom, freedom to live your own life among your own friends, freedom for everything that could make a woman happy, except that romantic love which you renounced when you accepted me as your husband. I believed in you, Vera, I believed in your truth and purity as I believe in God. I could never have reconciled myself to the life we have led in this house if it were not for my invincible faith in your truth. But within this month that faith has been shaken. Your eyes have lost the old look—the lovely look through which truth shone like a light. There is something unhappy, something mysterious. There is a secret—and I must know that secret before I leave you."
Her face changed to a look of stone as he watched her.
It was no time for tears. It was time for a superhuman effort at repression, to hold every feeling in check, to make her nerves iron.
There was defiance in her tone when she spoke, after a silence that seemed long.
"There is no secret."
"Then why are you unhappy?"
"I am not unhappy. I have a fit of low spirits now and then, a feeling of physical depression, for which there is no reason; or perhaps my idle, useless life, and the luxury in which I live, may be the reason."