"You must not pity me," she said, a trifle unsteadily. "I do not deserve it. I have been a very wicked woman."
"It was not altogether your fault, Cleo," he said, vaguely trying to comfort, but she contradicted him almost fiercely.
"It was—it was, indeed, all my fault." She caught her breath sharply. "However, that was not what I wanted to speak about. It was this. I wanted to tell you that—that—after all, I do not love you. That I—I loved him—Orito!" She half-breathed the last word.
Sinclair sat back in his chair, and looked at her with slow, studying eyes.
She repeated wearily: "Yes; I loved him—but I—did not—know—it till it was too late!"
For a long time after that the two sat in complete silence. Sinclair could not find words to speak to her, and the girl had exhausted her heart in that heart-breaking and now tragic confession.
Then the man broke the silence with a sharp, almost impatient, ejaculation, which escaped him unconsciously. "The pity of it all!—Good God!"
"Arthur, I want to see—to speak to Numè before I go away. You will let me; will you not?"
He hesitated only a moment, and then: "Yes, dear, anything you want."
And when he was leaving her, she said to him, abruptly, with a sharp questioning note in her voice that wanted to be denied: