"I shall never be your wife again in reality. That can be your
room"--pointing to the one they had jointly occupied; "this one is mine," indicating the chamber on the other hand. "Aglaé has already taken my things into it."
Sir Karl stood gazing at her, lost in surprise.
"No one but ourselves need know of this," she resumed, her eyes dropping before the tender, pitiful gaze of his. "The arrangements are looked upon by Aglaé as a mere matter of convenience in the hot weather; the servants will understand it as such. I would spare us both gossip. For your sake and for mine I am proposing this medium course--to avoid the scandal that otherwise must ensue. I shall have to bear, Karl--to bear----" her heart nearly failed her in its bitter grief--"but it will be better than a public separation."
"You cannot mean what you say," he exclaimed. "Live apart from me! The cause cannot justify it."
"It scarcely becomes you to say this. Have you forgotten the sin?" she added, in a whisper.
"The sin? Well, of course it was sin--crime, rather. But that is of the past."
She thought she understood what he wished to imply, and bit her lips to keep down their bitter words.
He was surely treating her as the veriest child, striving to hoodwink her still! That he was agitated almost beyond control, she saw: and did not wonder at.
"The sin is past," he repeated. "No need to recall it or talk of it."
"Be it so," she scornfully said. "Its results remain. This, I presume, was the great secret you spoke of the night before our marriage."