“Do you mean that she has never known?� she cried, amazed.
“Never. David did not wish her to know, and we respected his wish. She believes her mother died when she was three years old; she even has a deep and constant tenderness for the Shut Room.�
She looked at him bewildered. “I do not understand.�
“Your room,� he explained simply; “he closed the door on it that day, and for twenty years it has been unchanged. Yesterday I saw the very book you laid face downwards on the table, the handkerchief you dropped. He has mourned you as dead. In his gentleness, his humility, his greatness of soul, he chooses to believe you died that day. He loved you before it, he has loved and mourned you ever since. No one has ever heard a reproach from his lips, no one ever will. You broke his heart.�
She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
The old man stood looking at her unmoved, though the storm of her emotion shook her from head to foot. Still weeping, she threw herself into the chair by the fire and bowed her head on her arms.
“It is twenty years,� she said at last, “and I have suffered—have you never forgiven me, William Cheyney?�
The old man’s face saddened yet more deeply. “There was nothing for me to forgive; we all had his great example.�
She looked up with swimming eyes, her lips twitching with pain. “It’s twenty years—he married me after David got the divorce, you knew that?�
The doctor nodded.