“You kept your secret well,” she said with mournful irony.  “You reserved it for the one person whom it could most injure:  my privilege is too great!”

“It is true,” he said.

She turned and looked at him.  She felt the depth of conviction with which he spoke, yet it hurt her.  She liked his dignity and his self-control, and would not have had them less; yet she gathered fresh bitterness from the fact that he did not lose them.  But to her each moment disclosed its new and uncontrollable emotions; as words came, her mind quickly filled again with the things she could not say.  She now went on: 

“I am forced to ask these questions, although I have no right to ask them and certainly I have no wish.  I have wanted to know whether I could carry out the plan that has seemed to me best for each of us.  If others shared your secret, I could not do this.  I am going away—­I am going in the morning.  I shall remain away a long time.  Since we have been seen together here to-night as usual, no one suspects now that for us everything has become nothing.  While I am away, no one can have the means of finding this out.  Before I return, there will be changes—­there may be many changes.  If we meet with indifference then, it will be thought that we have become indifferent, one of us, or both of us:  I suppose it will be thought to be you.  There will be comment, comment that will be hard to stand; but this will be the quietest way to end everything—­as far as anything can ever be ended.”

“Whatever you wish!  I leave it all to you.”

She did not pause to heed his words: 

“This will spare me the linking of my name with yours any further just now; it will spare me all that I should suffer if the matter which estranges us should be discovered and be discussed.  It will save me hereafter, perhaps, from being pointed out as a woman who so trusted and was so deceived.  It may shield my life altogether from some notoriety:  I could be grateful for that!”

She was thinking of her family name, and of the many proud eyes that were turned upon her in the present and out of the past.  There was a sting for her in the remembrance and the sting passed into her concluding words: 

“I do not forget that when I ask you to do all this, I, who am not given to practising deception, am asking you to go on practising yours.  I am urging you to shirk the consequences of your wrong-doing—­to enjoy in the world an untarnished name after you have tarnished your life.  Do not think I forget that!  Still I beg you to do as I say.  This is another of the humiliations you have led me to:  that although I am separated from you by all that once united us, I must remain partner with you in the concealment of a thing that would ruin you if it were known.”

She turned to him as though she experienced full relief through her hard and cruel words: 

“Do I understand, then, that this is to be buried away by you—­and by me—­from the knowledge of the world?”