“You can let the other woman take care of herself.  As for me, I appreciate your generosity, but I decline to be saved on those terms.  I’m fastidious about a few things, and that’s one of them.  What you are trying to tell me is that you do not care for me.”

She lifted her face.  “Walter, I have never in all my life deceived you.  I do not care for you.  Not in that way.”

He smiled.  “Well, I’ll be content so long as you care for me in any way—­your way.  I think your way’s a mistake; but I won’t insist on that.  I’ll do my best to adapt my way to yours, that’s all.”

Her face was very still.  Under their deep lids her eyes brooded, as if trying to see the truth inside herself.

“No—­no,” she moaned.  “I haven’t told you the truth.  I believe there is no way in which I can care for you again.  Or—­well—­I can care perhaps—­I’m caring now—­but—­”

“I see.  You do not love me.”

She shook her head.  “No.  I know what love is, and—­I do not love you.”

“If you don’t love me, of course there’s nothing more to be said.”

“Yes, there is.  There’s one thing that I have kept from you.”

“Well,” he said, “you may as well let me have it.  There’s no good keeping things from me.”

“I had meant to spare you.”

At that he laughed.  “Oh, don’t spare me.”

She still hesitated.

“What is it?”

She spoke low.

“If you had been here—­that night—­Peggy would not have died.”

He drew a quick breath.  “What makes you think that?” he said quietly.

“She overstrained her heart with crying.  As you know.  She was crying for you.  And you were not there.  Nothing would make her believe that you were not dead.”

She saw the muscles of his face contract with sudden pain.

He looked at her gravely.  The look expressed his large male contempt for her woman’s cruelty; also a certain luminous compassion.

“Why have you told me this?” he said.

“I’ve told you, because I think the thought of it may restrain you when nothing else will.”

“I see.  You mean to say, you believe I killed her?”

Anne closed her eyes.

CHAPTER XXXVI

He did not know whether he believed what she had said, nor whether she believed it herself, neither could he understand her motive in saying it.

At intervals he was profoundly sorry for her.  Pity for her loosened, from time to time, the grip of his own pain.  He told himself that she must have gone through intolerable days and nights of misery before she could bring herself to say a thing like that.  Her grief excused her.  But he knew that, if he had been in her place, she in his, he the saint and she the sinner, and that, if he had known her through her sin to be responsible for the child’s death, there was no misery on earth that could have made him charge her with it.