“No one else?”
“No one—to my knowledge.”
“But you are, I understand, engaged to marry Cyril Chetwode,” I said, anxious to get the truth. “How can you marry him if you are really a wife?”
“Ah! that’s just it!” she cried. “I am the most miserable girl in all the world. Everything is so hazy, so enshrouded in mystery. I am married, and yet I have no husband.”
“But is it not perhaps best that, under the circumstances, you should be apart,” I said. “He may be old, or ugly, or a man you could never love.”
“I dread to think of it,” she said hoarsely. “Sometimes I wonder what he is really like, and who he really is.”
“And, at the same time, you love Cyril Chetwode?” I said, the words almost choking me.
I saw she loved that young ape, and my heart sank within me.
“We are very good friends,” she answered.
“But you love him? Why not admit it?” I said.