“Every word?”
“Every word.”
He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly have taken a lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and have made of it, by some sort of sophistry, a valid denial. However, she only repeated—
“It is true.”
“Is he living?” Angel then asked.
“The baby died.”
“But the man?”
“He is alive.”
A last despair passed over Clare’s face.
“Is he in England?”
“Yes.”
He took a few vague steps.
“My position—is this,” he said abruptly. “I thought—any man would have thought—that by giving up all ambition to win a wife with social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of the world, I should secure rustic innocence as surely as I should secure pink cheeks; but—However, I am no man to reproach you, and I will not.”
Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had not been needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she saw that he had lost all round.
“Angel—I should not have let it go on to marriage with you if I had not known that, after all, there was a last way out of it for you; though I