“Tell me it is not true that you have ever loved any one else.”
This time she faced him fully. “It is not true,” she repeated.
“Ursula, God knows I have never wronged you by a word.”
“I have never wronged you by a thought,” she answered, rising to her feet, and he felt that, whatever time might alter, one shadow must remain.
“I love you,” he said. “I have loved you from the first. I shall always love you through all my weakness and all my wrong.”
She put her arm round his neck and kissed him.
Twice during the night Ursula slipped away from her room to listen at the nursery door. She crept back gratefully amid the perfect silence. The slight irritation in her own throat was what people always feel, she told herself, at the bare mention of diphtheria. Yet all next day she kept away from little Otto.
She was sitting at the piano, when her husband came in to her, with a white scare on his bronzed face.
“The child is not well,” he said, hoarsely. “I have sent for the doctor.”