"I was not Dick's mistress, Roger."
"Were you his wife, then?"
"No."
"Then how did you come to——? But I don't want to hear. I have no right to ask. I have heard enough."
He made as if to go.
Annette turned upon him in the dusk with a fierce white face, and gripped his shoulder with a hand of steel.
"You have not heard enough till you have heard everything," she said.
And holding him forcibly, she told him of her life in Paris with her father, and of her disastrous love affair, and her determination to drown herself, and her meeting with Dick, and her reckless, apathetic despair. Did he understand? He made no sign.
After a time, her hand fell from his shoulder. He made no attempt to move. The merciful mist enclosed them, and dimmed them from each other. Low in the east, entangled in a clump of hawthorn, a thin moon hung blurred as if seen through tears.