“I am most attentive,” said her husband. “Shall we take to the wood for privacy?”
Grace demurred, and Fitzpiers gave in, and they kept the public road.
At any rate she would take his arm? This also was gravely negatived, the refusal being audible to Marty.
“Why not?” he inquired.
“Oh, Mr. Fitzpiers—how can you ask?”
“Right, right,” said he, his effusiveness shrivelled up.
As they walked on she returned to her inquiry. “It is about a matter that may perhaps be unpleasant to you. But I think I need not consider that too carefully.”
“Not at all,” said Fitzpiers, heroically.
She then took him back to the time of poor Winterborne’s death, and related the precise circumstances amid which his fatal illness had come upon him, particularizing the dampness of the shelter to which he had betaken himself, his concealment from her of the hardships that he was undergoing, all that he had put up with, all that he had done for her in his scrupulous considerateness. The retrospect brought her to tears as she asked him if he thought that the sin of having driven him to his death was upon her.
Fitzpiers could hardly help showing his satisfaction at what her narrative indirectly revealed, the actual harmlessness of an escapade with her lover, which had at first, by her own showing, looked so grave, and he did not care to inquire whether that harmlessness had been the result of aim or of accident. With regard to her question, he declared that in his judgment no human being could answer it. He thought that upon the whole the balance of probabilities turned in her favor. Winterborne’s apparent strength, during the last months of his life, must have been delusive. It had often occurred that after a first attack of that insidious disease a person’s apparent recovery was a physiological mendacity.