“I am going to the library to write some letters, Mildred,” he said: “don’t sit up for me.”
She rose quickly and went over to him.
“Let me have half-an-hour’s talk with you first, George,” she said, in an earnest voice: “I want so much to speak to you.”
“My dearest, I am always at your service,” he answered quietly; and they went across the hall together, to that fine old room which was essentially the domain of the master of the house.
It was a large room with three long narrow windows—unaltered from the days of Queen Anne—looking out to the carriage-drive in the front of the house, and the walls were lined with books, in severely architectural bookcases. There was a lofty marble chimneypiece, richly decorated, and in front of the fireplace there was an old-fashioned knee-hole desk, at which Mr. Greswold was wont to sit. There was a double reading-lamp ready-lighted for him upon this desk, and there was no other light in the room. By this dim light the sombre colouring of oak bookcases and maroon velvet window-curtains deepened to black. The spacious room had almost a funereal aspect, like that awful banqueting-hall to which Domitian invited his parasites and straightway frightened them to death.
“Well, Mildred, what is the matter?” asked Greswold, when his wife had seated herself beside him in front of the massive oak desk at which all the business of his estate had been transacted since he came to Enderby. “There is nothing amiss, love, I hope, to make you so earnest?”
“There is something very much amiss, George,” she answered. “Forgive me if I pain you by what I have to say—by the questions I am going to ask. I cannot help giving you pain, truly and dearly as I love you. I cannot go on suffering as I have suffered since that wretched Sunday afternoon when I discovered how you had deceived me—you whom I so trusted, so honoured as the most upright among men.”
“It is a little hard that you should say I deceived you, Mildred. I suppressed one fact which had no bearing upon my relations with you.”
“You must have signed your name to a falsehood in the register, if you described yourself as a bachelor.”
“I did not so describe myself. I confided the fact of my first marriage to your father on the eve of our wedding. I told him why I had been silent—told him that my past life had been steeped in bitterness. He was generous enough to accept my confidence and to ask no questions. My bride was too shy and too agitated to observe what I wrote in the register, or else she might have noted the word ‘widower’ after my name.”