Shattuck sprang to his feet.

“It’s not true!” he gasped.  “It’s not true!”

The woman never even raised her eyes.  She went on carefully inspecting the filmy bit of lace in her hands.

“It is true,” she replied.  “Never mind how I discovered it.  I know it.  That is why she has gone abroad alone.  I did not speak until I had to.  I am a coward, but not enough of one to bear the thought of her alone in a foreign country with mind and emotions clouded.  I may be cowardly enough to wish that I had never found it out,—­I am not coward enough to keep silent any longer.”

A torrent of words rushed to the man’s lips, but he was too wise to make excuses.  Yet there were excuses.  Any fair-minded judge would have said so.  But he knew better than to think that for one moment they would be excuses in the mind of this woman.  Besides, the first man’s excuse for the first sin has never been viewed with much respect under the modern civilization.

He felt her slowly rise to her feet, and when he raised his head to look at her—­not yet fully realizing what had happened to him—­all emotion seemed to have become so foreign to her face, that he felt as if she were already a stranger to him.

She took a last look round the room.  Her eyes seemed to devour every detail.

“I shall find means to give you your freedom at once.”

“You will actually leave me—­go away?”

“Can we two remain together now?”

“But your children?”

“Your children, Dick—­I have forgotten that I have any.  I have had my life.  You have still yours to live.”

She swept by him down the long room, everything in which was so closely associated with her.  Before she reached the door, he was there—­and his back against it.  She stopped, but she did not look at him.  If she could have read the truth in his face, it would have told her that she had never been loved as she was at that moment.  All that she had been in her loyalty, her nobility, was so much a part of this man’s life.  What, compared to that, were petty sins, or big ones?  He saw the past as a drowning man sees the panorama of his existence.  Yet he knew that everything he could say would be powerless to move her.

It was useless to remind her of their happy years together.  They could never be happy again with this between them.  It would be equally useless to tell her that this other woman had known, but too well, that he would never desert his wife for her.  Had he not betrayed her?

Of what use to tell her how he had repented his folly, that he could never understand it himself?  There were the facts, and Nature, and his wife’s philosophy against him.

And he had dared be gay the moment the steamer slid into the channel!  Was that only this morning?  It seemed to be in the last century.

She approached, and stretched her hand toward the door.