“Mrs. Lightmark,” he said at last, in a low, constrained voice, “I promise to answer any question that is within my knowledge.”

“It is about my—­my husband and Philip Rainham.  What passed between them in the autumn of last year?  Who was that woman?”

He did not reply for a moment; but unconsciously his eyes met hers full, and in their brief encounter it was possible that many truths were silently told.  Presently she continued: 

“You need not tell me, Mr. Oswyn.  I can see your answer as plainly as if you had spoken.  It is my husband——­”

She broke off sharply, let her beautiful head droop with a movement of deep prostration upon her hands.

“What have I done, what have I done,” she moaned, “that this dishonour should come to me?”

It was a long time before she looked up at him.

“Why did he do it?” she whispered.

“Have you never guessed?” he asked in his turn.  “I will tell you, Mrs. Lightmark.  I was with him when he was dying.  He wished you to know; he had some such time as this in his mind.  It was a sort of message.”

“He wished me to know—­a sort of message,” she repeated blankly.  “He spoke of me, then—­he forgave me for my hard judgement, for knowing him so ill?”

“It was himself that he did not forgive for not having guarded you better, for having been deceived by your husband.  He spoke of you to me very fully at the last when we both saw that his death was merely a question of days.  I saw then what I had sometimes suspected before, that you had absorbed his whole life, that his devotion to you was a kind of religion.”

“He loved me?” she asked at last, in a hushed, strange voice, white to the lips.

Oswyn bowed his head.

“Ever since you were a child.  It was very beautiful, and it was with him at the last as a light.  Don’t reproach yourself; it was to prevent that that he wished you to be told.”

“To prevent it!” she cried, with tragical scorn.  “Am I not to reproach myself that I was hard and callous and cold; that I never understood nor cared; that I was not with him?  Not reproach myself?  Oh, Philip, Philip!” she called, breaking down utterly, laying her face in her hands.

Oswyn averted his eyes, giving her passion time to appease itself.  When he glanced at her again, she had gathered her cloak round her, was standing by the picture from which she seemed loath to remove her eyes.

“You gave him great happiness,” he suggested gently, “in the only manner in which it was possible.  Remember only that.  He must in any case have died.”

He imagined that she hardly heard him, absorbed in the desolation of her own thought; and when she turned to him again, quite ready for departure now, he saw by the hard light in her eyes that she had recurred to her husband, to the irreparable gulf which must henceforth divide them.

“I can’t go back to him,” she whispered, as if she communed with herself.  “I hate him; yes, I hate him, with my whole soul.  He has lied to me too much; he has made me do such a cruel wrong.  There are things which one can’t forgive.  Ah, no! it’s not possible.”