"I'm just—Kitty!" she said, choking—"as bad as bad can be. But I couldn't have done what Mary Lyster did."
"Kitty—for God's sake!"
"Oh, I know it," she said, almost with triumph—"now I know it. I determined to know—and I got people in Venice to find out. She sent the message—that told him where I was—and I know the man who took it. I suppose it would be pathetic if I sent her word that I had forgiven her. But I haven't!"
Ashe cried out that it was wholly and utterly inconceivable.
"Oh no!—she hated me because I had robbed her of Geoffrey. I had killed her life, I suppose—she killed mine. It was what I deserved, of course; only just at that moment—If there is a God, William, how could He have let it happen so?"
The tears choked her. He left his seat, and, kneeling beside her, he raised her in his arms, while she murmured broken and anguished confessions.
"I was so weak—and frightened. And he said, it was no good trying to go back to you. Everybody knew I had gone to Verona—and he had followed me—No one would ever believe—And he wouldn't go—wouldn't leave me. It would be mere cruelty and desertion, he said. My real life was—with him. And I seemed—paralyzed. Who had sent that message? It never occurred to me—I felt as if some demon held me—and I couldn't escape—"
And again the sighs and tears, which wrung his heart—with which his own mingled. He tried to comfort her; but what comfort could there be? They had been the victims of a crime as hideous as any murder; and yet—behind the crime—there stretched back into the past the preparations and antecedents by which they themselves, alack, had contributed to their own undoing. Had they not both trifled with the mysterious test of life—he no less than she? And out of the dark had come the axe-stroke that ends weakness, and crushes the unsteeled, inconstant will.