"My God!" Michael said quickly, "I hate to see the little coward near you! How dared you come? Get up!" he said again. "And clear out! I thought we had finished with you for ever!"
Millicent dragged herself to her feet. She stood before him, a slender, nun-like figure; one of the black shawls which enveloped her had fallen to the floor.
"Go on, say all you feel—I deserve it, every word of it! I left you to your fate when you were in danger, I fled from the camp with but one idea in my head—my own safety, my desire to get as far as I could from the infection of smallpox. I carried the hateful disease with me; I am so disfigured that you must never see me. Never!" Her words ended in a low cry of self-pity.
"My God!" Michael said. "Are you speaking the truth! Did you get smallpox?" He knew that the blame was partly his.
"Yes, but don't look at me. I can't bear it. Anything but that, oh not that!" Michael had stooped to raise her a veil.
His eyes met Margaret's. "Poor soul!" he said. "Poor little soul!"
"Yes, fate has punished me," Millicent said. "You can do no more."
Michael groaned. "We have not talked of it all yet, Margaret," he said miserably, "the horror of the smallpox."
"Millicent has told me about it, Michael." She tried to smile. "It is a thing of the past. What good will talking do? We are happy again."
Millicent turned to Michael. "I have told her a very little," she said. "And now I have something which I must tell you. When I saw her in Cairo I told her that I had been with you, I told her that you would write to me, I inferred that you and I were lovers."