A few steps more. How quickly we are getting through the park! We shall reach the church, and I shall not have heard. I shall sit and stand and kneel all through the service with the pain of that gnawing curiosity—that hateful new vague jealousy aching at my heart.
It is impossible! I stop. I stand stock-still in the summer grass.
"I hate your hints! I hate your innuendoes!" I say, passionately. "I have always lived with people who spoke their thoughts straight out! Tell me this moment! I will not move a step from this spot till you do."
"I have nothing worth speaking of to tell," he answers, slightly. "It is only that never having had a wife myself, I have taken an outsider's view; I have taken it for granted that when two people marry each other they make a clean breast of their past history—make a mutual confession of their former—"
He pauses, as if in search of a word.
"But supposing," cry I, eagerly, "that they have nothing to tell, nothing to confess—"
He shrugs his shoulders.
"That is so likely, is it not?"
"Likely or not," cry I, excitedly, "it was true in my case. If you had put me on the rack, I could have confessed nothing!"
"I do not see the analogy," he answers, coldly; "you are—what did you tell me? nineteen?—It is to be supposed"—(with a rather unlovely smile)—"that your history is yet to come; and he is—forty-seven! We shall be late for church!"—with a glance at Algy's and Barbara's quickly diminishing figures.