"Everybody knew it. The poor dear managed so badly that everybody in the place knew it. She knew, that's why she dragged him away and made him live abroad. She hated living abroad, but she liked it better than seeing him going to pieces over the girl."
"I don't believe it. If there was anything in it I'd have been sure to have heard of it…. Why, there wasn't anybody here but me—"
"It must have been years before your time," he said. "You could hardly even have come in for the sad end of it."
* * * * *
Dorsy Heron said it was true.
"It was you he was in love with. Everybody saw it but you."
She remembered. His face when she came to him. In the library. And what he had said.
"A man might be in love with you for ten years and you wouldn't know about it if he held his tongue."
And her face. Her poor face, so worried when people saw them together. And that last night when she stroked your arm and when she saw him looking at it and stopped. And her eyes. Frightened. Frightened.
"How I must have hurt him. How I must have hurt them both."