"Oh, Polly Anne, Polly Anne!—don't think—don't believe?..."
"Go on. What?"
"... anything but what I've told you.... Oh, my dear!..."
But Marianne has left him, and is on her way upstairs. She is quite changed from the Polly Anne who was standing by the window but now. She walks stonily, and looks white. But her fortitude only lasts as far as the return of the staircase. As she turns, and knows that he can see her face from below, lighted as it is by the gas on the landing above, she breaks down altogether, and reaches her bedroom-door in a passion of hysterical tears.
"No—no—no—no!" she cries. "Take away your hands. Go away and leave me." For her husband has followed her, three steps at a time. He knows, and the knowledge is a knife in his heart, how wrong he has been; not in falling in love out of bounds—a thing he had no control over—but in showing that letter, which he could easily have refused to do. Passion and action live on opposite sides of the river. Now, what worlds would he give to find palliation for himself in his inner conscience!—it is the want of that that ties the tongue of his explanation to her. Yet he must qualify his contrition, if only that plenary admission of guilt would be taken to imply still more, and worse, to come.
"Polly Anne dearest, for God's sake don't run away with a false idea! A great deal too much is being made of a trifle. If you would only be patient with me!..."
"I am patient. Now tell—what is the false idea? Why is it too much? Why is it a trifle?—showing my letter to—to that woman before you had read it yourself!" She is killing her sobs as she speaks, and has a hard struggle. They are heads of a Lernæan Hydra.
"Don't be unfair to me, dear! I had read it, all except that one bit on the back. It was so easy to miss it!"
"I never do—things on the back of letters."
"It was stupid of me. But what you don't understand, dear, is that I wanted Miss Arkroyd to read your message herself. There was certainly nothing you could have minded her seeing in the letter itself."