“While I tell Helena?” said Buntingford, heavily.  “Yes.  Better get it over.  Say, please—­I should be grateful for no more talk than is inevitable.”

Geoffrey stood by awkwardly, not knowing how to express the painful sympathy he felt.  His very pity made him abrupt.

“I am to say—­that you always believed—­she was dead?”

Under what name to speak of the woman lying at the Rectory puzzled him.  The mere admission of the thought that however completely in the realm of morals she might have forfeited his name, she was still Buntingford’s wife in the realm of law, seemed an outrage.

At the question, Buntingford sprang up suddenly from the seat on which he had fallen; and Geoffrey, who was standing near him involuntarily retreated a few steps, in amazement at the passionate animation which for the moment had transformed the whole aspect of the elder man.

“Yes, you may say so—­you must say so!  There is no other account you can give of it!—­no other account I can authorize you to give it.  It is four-fifths true—­and no one in this house—­not even you—­has any right to press me further.  At the same time, I am not going to put even the fraction of a lie between myself and you, Geoffrey, for you have been—­a dear fellow—­to me!” He put his hand a moment on Geoffrey’s shoulder, withdrawing it instantly.  “The point is—­what would have come about—­if this had not happened?  That is the test.  And I can’t give a perfectly clear answer.”  He began to pace the room—­thinking aloud.  “I have been very anxious—­lately—­to marry.  I have been so many years alone; and I—­well, there it is!—­I have suffered from it, physically and morally; more perhaps than other men might have suffered.  And lately—­you must try and understand me, Geoffrey!—­although I had doubts—­yes, deep down, I still had doubts—­whether I was really free—­I have been much more ready to believe than I used to be, that I might now disregard the doubts—­silence them!—­for good and all.  It has been my obsession—­you may say now my temptation.  Oh! the divorce court would probably have freed me—­have allowed me to presume my wife’s death after these fifteen years.  But the difficulty lay in my own conscience.  Was I certain?  No!  I was not certain!  Anna’s ways and standards were well known to me.  I could imagine various motives which might have induced her to deceive me.  At the same time”—­he stopped and pointed to his writing-table—­“these drawers are stuffed full of reports and correspondence, from agents all over Europe, whom I employed in the years before the war to find out anything they could.  I cannot accuse myself of any deliberate or wilful ignorance.  I made effort after effort—­in vain.  I was entitled—­at last—­it often seemed to me to give up the effort, to take my freedom.  But then”—­his voice dropped—­“I thought of the woman I might love—­and wish to marry.  I should indeed have told her everything, and the law might have been ready to protect us.  But if Anna still lived, and were suddenly to reappear in my life—­what a situation!—­for a sensitive, scrupulous woman!”