"And blame me as little as possible?"
"I cannot blame you."
"Before you say that, listen to as much as I can tell you of the story. I was a young girl when I went out alone to be married to him in India. We had parted in England eight months before, and he had remained unchanged—his letters all told the same tale. I quarrelled with my mother—as I now see most unreasonably—merely because she wished to marry again. Perhaps she was a little to blame not to be more patient with a headstrong, ill-regulated girl. I was both. It ended in my writing out to him in India that I should come out and marry him at once. My mother made no opposition." She remained silent for a little, and her eyes fell. Then she spoke with more effort, rather as one who answers her own thoughts. "No, I need say nothing of the time between. It was no excuse for the wrong I did him. I can tell you what that was...." It did not seem easy, though, when it came to actual words. Fenwick spoke into the pause.
"Why tell me now? Tell me another time."
"I prefer now. It was this way: I kept something back from him till after we were married—something I should have told him before. Had I done so, I believe to this moment we should never have parted. But my concealment threw doubt on all else I said.... I am telling more than I meant to tell." She hesitated again, and then went on. "That was my wrong to him—the concealment. But, of course, it was not the ground of the divorce proceedings." Fenwick stopped her again.
"Why tell me any more? You are being led on—are leading yourself on—to say more than you wish."
"Well, I will leave it there. Only, Fenwick, understand this: my husband was young and generous and noble-hearted. Had I trusted him, I believe all might have gone well, even though he...." She hesitated again, and then cancelled something unsaid. "The concealment was my fault—the mistrust. That was all. Nothing else was my fault." As she says the words in praise of her husband she finds it a pleasure to let her eyes rest on the grave, handsome, puzzled face that, after all, really is his. She catches herself wondering—so oddly do the undercurrents of mind course about—where he got that sharp white scar across his nose. It was not there in the old days.
She looks at him until he, too, looks up, and their eyes meet. "Well, then," she says, "I will tell you no more. Blame me as little as possible." And to this repetition of her previous words he says again, "I cannot blame you," very emphatically.
But Mrs. Nightingale felt perplexed at his evident sincerity; would rather he should have indulged in truisms, we were not all of us perfect, and so forth. When she spoke again, some bars of the music later, she took for granted that his mind, like hers, was still dwelling on his last words. She felt half sorry she had, so to speak, switched off the current of the conversation.