“Well,” repeated Glasgow, “what about this martyr to principle?”
“It was I,” she said, and everything around seemed to throb and stand still, like her heart.
“Perhaps you will kindly explain what you mean,” he said, very coldly and politely.
“You lent me a book last month—the Fortnightly Review—and I found a letter to you in it, a letter that you had forgotten was there.”
He remained silent for a moment, and then spoke with a jerk—
“May I ask who it was from?”
“A woman.”
“You read it?”
“I could hardly help reading it, it was all on the first sheet.”
She looked at him with the courage of an honourable nature owning to what it would self-righteously have despised in another, and he saw the moistness in her eyes.