He watched her clouded face and waited. Twice she seemed about to speak but the constrained reticence of the past two years still fettered her tongue.
"I have never told anyone," she said huskily. "I don't know how much I ought to tell. I only believe that it may be a divorcing matter, according to Law; if I had not put myself under Catholic discipline."
He placed his hands on her shoulders and pushed her down on to a moss-upholstered bench near which, perched on a pillar, mocked a laughing stone faun.
"You must tell me," he said. And took his place beside her, covering her hand with his own.
Presently, with an obvious effort, she asked,
"You will not have forgotten Muriel Vane?"
His fingers contracted and she paused to reflect that if Cyprian had not remained so true in the abstract to his First Vision he would hardly have been Cyprian; and her god.
But she could not long mis-read the expression of raw disgust on his face as she lifted hers. It puzzled her.
"Nothing would hurt now, Cyprian—if you knew. She is—not quite normal now. Not since a long time has she——"
"I know all that." His tone was cruelly hard. "For a long while I would not allow myself to believe those rumours.... And once I thought to put her before you! It is that I shall never forget." Even so does a man resent his mistakes on their object instead of on himself.