"I left so she wouldn't have to suffer."
"Well you were all wrong, Ann. You have caused us—" But as, looking into her face, he saw what she had suffered, he was silenced.
She was feverish; her eyes were large and deep and perilously bright, her temples and cheeks cruelly thin. But what hurt him most were not the marks of illness and weakness. It was the harassed look. Fear.
Fear—that thing so invaluable in building character.
Thought of the needlessness of it wrung from him: "Ann—how could you!"
"Why I thought I was doing right," she murmured. "I thought I was being kind."
He smiled faintly, sadly, at the irony and the bitter pity of that.
"But how could you think that?" he pressed. "Not that it matters now—but
I don't see how you could."
She looked at him strangely. "Do you—know?"
He nodded.