“What is it?”
He was silent for a few moments. To tell her would involve long explanations. Yvonne knew of Annie Stevens in connection with his disgrace on the tour of “The Diamond Door,” but he had not spoken of after meetings. Yvonne put her work aside, in her quick way, and came and sat down on the footstool by his feet. As he bent and kissed her, she drew his arm round her neck, holding his hand.
“What has pained you?”
And then he told her the whole of the girl’s miserable story, her love for him, her degradation and downfall, and her wild idea of atonement.
“And this is the end,” he said, showing her the paragraph.
“Poor girl!” said Yvonne, deeply touched. “It was so pathetically impossible, was n’t it?”
“Yes, dear,” Joyce answered. “I, too, know that.”
“What?”
“The tragic futility of such self-crucifixion. I have never told you the history of that night—why I gave you up—and the part this poor dead girl played in it.”
In a low voice, he went over the old ground of degradation and his longing for atonement, and briefly laid before her the facts of his renunciation.