“And so you thought you might confess to a fellow sinner?”
Anne’s cheek still rested on Madge’s hair, and over her head, her eyes smiled very quietly into the fire.
Madge was silent.
“I knew you wouldn’t utterly despise me,” she murmured at last, in a low voice.
“He has gone?” asked Anne after a moment. “You sent him away?”
“He came on Monday—two or three days ago. I’ve forgotten when.” She made a distracted gesture. “Until—until just lately, it was all right. We were not—not——”
“Not lovers,” said Anne, finishing the sentence for her in an even voice.
“Well, he came. And by that time I’d come to my senses, and to all this awful misery. He’s very kind,” she went on with a sort of surprise, as a child might speak of the unexpected clemency of some grown-up person. “He said he didn’t want to make me unhappy, and if I pleased it should all be at an end, and he would go away. So he went. But Harry’s coming to-morrow, and I daren’t meet him. I daren’t look at him. It’s awful—awful! I would kill myself,—but I daren’t do that either.”
She rose from her knees, and sank back in her chair, exhausted and shaking; her eyes fixed on Anne were the eyes of a little hunted animal.
All the terror of the gulf she had put between herself and respectable women, all the horror of feeling herself déclassée outside the pale of moral virtue, filled her conventional little soul. It outweighed the sense of her personal disloyalty; it was greater than her sense of wanton treachery towards her husband. She was no longer a respectable woman, and in that fact lay the sting.