"What? You mean to make trouble? I, who have kept my own counsel all these years, am to be disgraced because I have at last confided in you? You will scandalise society—you will separate from me—"
She stopped, half choked by a rising paroxysm of rage.
He looked at her as he might have looked at some small angry animal.
"I shall make no trouble," he answered, quietly—"and I shall not scandalise society. But I cannot live with you. I will go away at once on some convenient excuse—abroad—anywhere—and you can say whatever you please of my prolonged absence. If I could be of any use or protection to the girl I saw last night—the daughter of my friend Pierce Armitage—I would stay, but circumstances render any such service from me impossible. Besides, she needs no one to assist her—she has made a position for herself—a position more enviable than yours or mine. You have that to think about by way of—consolation?—or reproach?"
She stood drawn up to her full height, looking at him.
"You cannot forgive me, then?" she said.
He shuddered.
"Forgive you! Is there a man who could forgive twenty years of deliberate deception from the wife he thought the soul of honour? Maude, Maude! We live in lax times truly, when men and women laugh at principle and good faith, and deal with each other less honestly than the beasts of the field,—but for me there is a limit!—a limit you have passed! I think I could pardon your wrong to me more readily than I can pardon your callous desertion of the child you brought into the world—your lack of womanliness—motherliness!—your deliberate refusal to give Pierce Armitage the chance of righting the wrong he had committed in a headstrong, heart-strong rush of thoughtless passion!—he WOULD have righted it, I know, and been a loyal husband to you, and a good father to his child. For whatever his faults were he was neither callous nor brutal. You prevented him from doing this,—you were tired of him—your so-called 'love' for him was a mere selfish caprice of the moment—and you preferred deceit and a rich marriage to the simple duty of a woman! Well!—you may find excuses for yourself,—I cannot find them for you! I could not remain by your side as a husband and run the risk of coming constantly in contact, as we did last night, with that innocent girl, placed as she is, in a situation of so much difficulty, by the sins of her parents—her mother, my wife!—her father, my dead friend! The position is, and would be untenable!"
Still she stood, looking at him.
"Have you done?" she asked.