“Mr. David Macklin wishes to marry me the moment I am free.”
“Macklin!” he exclaimed, his astonishment so visibly naïve that she was hard put to it to check a smile. “Well, that is a surprise.”
“Why?”
“I had not counted on Macklin,” he said cynically. “If he is another one, I knew nothing of it.”
“He has never been my lover—really—if that is what you mean,” she said quickly.
He looked at her, at this strange woman who had lived so many years by his side, and even as she in the scene of her confession had yielded him an involuntary tribute for his mastery of the scene, he felt an almost animal admiration for the genius of fascination in her which could achieve such a stroke in the moment of her humiliation.
“I wonder what story you could have told him,” he said, yielding frankly to this impulse.
“That is not the point,” she said indifferently. “But, first, I want you to know me as I am. Your detectives have told you much. It is nothing to the reality.”
“Is it possible there is more?” he said coldly.
“You shall judge; I shan’t withhold anything,” she said heavily, and lines of age and weariness came into her face as she doggedly came to her decision. “You will loathe me, but you will understand why I am as I am. I don’t ask you to take me back; I admit I cannot be true to any man.”