"Do you mean you've sent Lionel away?" Winn asked anxiously.
"Yes," she said in a forlorn little voice; "yesterday I sent him away. He didn't know I was coming over here, he was very miserable. He asked me if I knew about you—he said he believed you wanted me to—and I said, 'Of course I know everything.' I wasn't going to let him think you hadn't told me. Why did you go away?"
He had not thought she would ask him that. It was as if he saw before him an interminable hill which he had believed himself to have already climbed.
He drew a deep breath, then he said:
"Didn't they talk about it? I wrote to her, the chaplain's wife I mean; I hadn't time to see her, but I sent it by the porter. I thought she'd do; she seemed a gossipy woman, kept on knitting and gassing over a stove in the hall. I thought she was—a sort of circulating library, you see. I tipped the porter—tow-headed Swiss brute. I suppose he swallowed it."
"He went away the same day you did," Claire explained. "Nobody told me anything. Do you think I would have let them? I wouldn't let Lionel, and I knew he had a right to, but I didn't care about anybody's rights. You see, I—I thought you'd tell me yourself. So I came," she finished quietly.
She waited. Winn began to draw patterns on the snow with his stick, then he said:
"I've been a bit of a blackguard not telling you myself. I didn't want to talk about it, and that's a fact. I'm married."
He kept his face turned away from her. It seemed a long time before she spoke.
"You should have told me that before," she said in a queer, low voice. "It's too late now."