“Listen to me. Two years ago I was told that I am a common foundling. Under the shock of that—disclosure—I ruined my life for ever.... Don’t speak! I mean to check that ruin where it ended—lest it spread to—others. Do you understand?”
“No,” he said doggedly.
She drew a steady breath. “Then I’ll tell you more if I must. I ruined my life for ever two years ago!... I must have been quite out of my senses—they had told me that morning, very tenderly and pitifully—what you already know. I—it was—unbearable. The world crashed down around me—horror, agonized false pride, sheer terror for the future—”
She choked slightly, but went on:
“I was only eighteen. I wanted to die. I meant to leave my home at any rate. Oh, I know my reasoning was madness, the thought of their charity—the very word itself as my mind formed it—drove me almost insane. I might have known it was love, not charity, that held me so safely in their hearts. But when a blow falls and reason goes—how can a girl reason?”
She looked down at her bridle hand.
“There was a man,” she said in a low voice; “he was only a boy then.”
Hamil’s face hardened.
“Until he asked me I never supposed any man could ever want to marry me. I took it for granted.... He was Gray’s friend; I had always known him.... He had been silly sometimes. He asked me to marry him. Then he asked me again.
“I was a debutante that winter, and we were rehearsing some theatricals for charity which I had to go through with.... And he asked me to marry him. I told him what I was and he still wished it.”
Hamil bent nearer from his saddle, face tense and colourless.
“I don’t know exactly what I thought; I had a dim notion of escaping from the disgrace of being nameless. It was the mad clutch of the engulfed at anything.... Not with any definite view—partly from fright, partly I think for the sake of those who had been kind to a—a foundling; some senseless idea that it was my duty to relieve them of a squalid burden—” She shook her head vaguely: “I don’t know exactly—I don’t know.”
“You married him.”
“Yes—I believe so.”
“Don’t you know?”
“Oh, yes,” she said wearily, “I know what I did. It was that.”
And after he had waited for her in silence for fully a minute she said in a low voice:
“I was very lonely, very, very tired; he urged me; I had been crying. I have seldom cried since. It is curious, isn’t it? I can feel the tears in my eyes at night sometimes. But they never fall.”
She passed her gloved hand slowly across her forehead and eyes.
“I—married him. At first I did not know what to do; did not realise, understand. I scarcely do yet. I had supposed I was to go to mother and dad and tell them that I had a name in the world—that all was well with me at last. But I could not credit it myself; the boy—I had known him always—went and came in our house as freely as Gray. And I could not convince myself that the thing that had happened was serious—had really occurred.”