Rosamund looked up.
“You could never be a coward,” she said.
“You don’t know that. Nobody knows that, perhaps, except myself. However that may be, I must not play the coward now. Lady Ingleton met your husband in Turkey. She brings very painful news of him.”
Rosamund clasped her hands together and let them lie on her knees. She was looking steadily at Father Robertson.
“His—his misery has made such an impression upon her that she felt obliged to come here. She sent for me. But her real object in coming was to see you, if possible. Will you see her?”
“No, no; I can’t do that. I don’t know her.”
“I think I ought to tell you what she said. She asked me if you had ever understood how much your husband loves you. Her exact words were, ‘Does his wife know how he loves her? Can she know it? Can she ever have known it?’”
All the red had died away from Rosamund’s face. She had become very pale. Her eyes were steady. She sat without moving, and seemed to be listening with fixed, even with strained, attention.
“And then she went on to tell me something which might seem to a great many people to be quite contradictory of what she had just said—and she said it with the most profound conviction. She told me that your husband has fallen very low.”
“Fallen——?” Rosamund said, in a dim voice.