“I was not.”
“Not even in the beginning?”
“Hardly in the beginning. It was an ill-advised union, the result of impulse.”
“But she loved you very dearly, perhaps.”
“She loved me—dearly—after her manner of loving.”
“And you did not love her?”
“It is a cruel thing you force me to say, Mildred. No, I did not love her.”
“Had you been married long when she died?”
She felt a quivering movement in the clenched hand on which her own lay caressingly, and she heard him draw a long and deep breath.
“About a year.”