"Wait and you will understand."
She felt now that forgiveness was the one thing that she could not bear. She was learning the most difficult of the moral lessons: that, hard as punishment may be, there is nothing so terrible as pardon.
"I want you to be angry," she said. "You ought to be angry. I was angry with you. That is what I am sorry for. It is all that I am sorry for, but I am very, very sorry for it. I ought to love you—I promised to love you; I thought I did love you, and if ever a man deserved to be loved, you deserve it. And yet I don't love you. I can't! Oh, I'll come back with you. I can't live with you as your wife, but I'll live with you. If you want me to, we can start right away."
But Stainton would not yet hear of that.
"Wait," he said, "wait. Perhaps we can think of something. Perhaps something will turn up." Jim put out a hand, a hand grown thin and heavily veined since his marriage, and timidly patted her arm. "My poor little girl!" he whispered. "My poor little child!"
"No, no!" she said, drawing away. "You must hate me!"
"I could never do that, Muriel."
"But you have to! Think of it: I don't love you—you, my husband—and I do—I do——"
The words that had come so easily by night and in anger she dared not utter here in calmness and by day. But Stainton supplied:
"You do love him?"