His lips were whitening. "But it—even allowing that I have a secret—need not weigh you down."
"Not weigh me down!—to terror deeper than yours; to shame more abject? Suppose I know the secret?"
"You cannot know it," he gasped. "It would have killed you."
"And what has it done? Look at me."
"Oh, Maude!" he wailed, "what is it that you do, or do not know? How did you learn anything about it?"
"I learnt it through my own folly. I am sorry for it now. My knowing it can make the fact neither better nor worse; and perhaps I might have been spared the knowledge to the end."
"But what is it that you know?" he asked, rather wishing at the moment he was dead himself.
"All."
"It is impossible."
"It is true."