She waited for him to speak—waited with a keyed-up intensity of longing that was almost physically painful. At last, unable to bear the continued silence, she spoke again. Her voice cracked a little.
“Why—why do you ask, Michael?”
He looked at her and a sudden cynical amusement gleamed in his eyes—an amusement so bitterly unmirthful that there seemed something almost brutal about it. Her hand went up to her face as though to screen out the sight of it.
“You can’t guess, I suppose?” he said with dry, harsh irony. Then, after a moment: “Why did you never tell me you were there? You never spoke of it. . . . Wasn’t it curious you should never speak of it?”
She made a step towards him. She could not endure this torturing suspense another instant. It was racking her. She must know what Stockleigh signified to him.
“What do you mean? Tell me what you mean!” she asked desperately.
“Do you remember the story I told you down at Netherway—of a man and his wife and another woman?”
“Yes, I remember”—almost whispering.
“That was the story of my sister, June, and her husband, Dan Storran. You—were the other woman.”
She felt his eyes—those eyes out of which all hope had died—fixed on her.