“My dear, dear love! my darling Dick!” says she, in the end.  And then she would have it told all over again, with a thousand questions, to draw forth more; and these being exhausted, she asks why I would have concealed so much from her, and if I did fear she would seek him.

“Nay, my dear,” says I; “’tis t’other way about.  For if your husband does forgive you, and yearns but to take you back into his arms, it would be an unnatural, cruel thing to keep you apart.  Therefore, to confess the whole truth, I did meditate going to him and showing how we and not you are to blame in this matter, and then telling him where he might find you, if on reflection he felt that he could honestly hold you guiltless.  But ere I do that (as I see now), I must know if you are willing to this accommodation; for if you are not, then are our wounds all opened afresh to no purpose, but to retard their healing.”

She made no reply nor any comment for a long time, nor did I seek to bias her judgment by a single word (doubting my wisdom).  But I perceived by the quivering of her arm within mine that a terrible conflict ’twixt passion and principle was convulsing every fibre of her being.  At the top of the hill above Greenwich she stopped, and, throwing back her hood, let the keen wind blow upon her face, as she gazed over the grey flats beyond the river.  And the air seeming to give her strength and a clearer perception, she says, presently: 

“Accommodation!” (And she repeats this unlucky word of mine twice or thrice, as if she liked it less each time.) “That means we shall agree to let bygones be bygones, and do our best to get along together for the rest of our lives as easily as we may.”

“That’s it, my dear,” says I, cheerfully.

“Hush up the past,” continues she, in the same calculating tone; “conceal it from the world, if possible.  Invent some new lie to deceive the curious, and hoodwink our decent friends.  Chuckle at our success, and come in time” (here she paused a moment) “to ’chat so lightly of our past knavery, that we could wish we had gone farther in the business.’” Then turning about to me, she asks:  “If you were writing the story of my life for a play, would you end it thus?”

“My dear,” says I, “a play’s one thing, real life’s another; and believe me, as far as my experience goes of real life, the less heroics there are in it the better parts are those for the actors in’t.”

She shook her head fiercely in the wind, and, turning about with a brusque vigour, cries, “Come on.  I’ll have no accommodation.  And yet,” says she, stopping short after a couple of hasty steps, and with a fervent earnestness in her voice, “and yet, if I could wipe out this stain, if by any act I could redeem my fault, God knows, I’d do it, cost what it might, to be honoured once again by my dear Dick.”

“This comes of living in a theatre all her life,” thinks I. And indeed, in this, as in other matters yet to be told, the teaching of the stage was but too evident.