He looked bewildered.
"There!" she cried, with a sudden wild gesture; "when I have told you it will undo it all. Oh! if Frank had never said a word to me; if I had had no excuse, no assurance, nothing to go upon, had just called to you in the dark, as it were, there would be some generosity, some atonement in that! Now you will think I waited to be meanly sure, instead of—"
She dropped her dark head upon his hand again with an abandonment which unnerved him, which he had almost to brace himself against.
"So it was Frank," he said—"Frank! Two hours ago, from my window, I saw him and Betty down by the river in the park. They were supposed to be fishing. As far as I could see they were sifting or walking hand in hand, in the face of day and the keepers. I prepared wise things to say to them. None of them will be said now, or listened to. As Frank's mentor I am undone."
He held her, looking at her intently.
"Shall I tell you," he asked, in a lower voice—"shall I show you something—something that I had on my heart as I was walking here?"
He slipped his hand into the breast-pocket of his coat, and drew out a little plain black leather case. When he opened it she saw that it contained a pen-and-ink sketch of herself that had been done one evening by a young artist staying at the Court, and—a bunch of traveller's joy.
She gazed at it with a mixture of happiness and pain. It reminded her of cold and selfish thoughts, and set them in relief against his constancy. But she had given away all rights—even the right to hate herself. Piteously, childishly, with seeking eyes, she held out her hand to him, as though mutely asking him for the answer to her outpouring—the last word of it all. He caught her whisper.
"Forgive?" he said to her, scorning her for the first and only time in their history. "Does a man forgive the hand that sets him free, the voice that recreates him? Choose some better word—my wife!"