why—we've been apart?”
I thought. “I suppose it is.”
“Why have you told me now?”
“Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to tell you.”
“Or else it wouldn't have mattered?”
“No.”
She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she looked about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, with a childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon her face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth of gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over the arms of her chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch her tears.
“I am sorry, Margaret,” I said. “I was in love.... I did not understand....”
Presently she asked: “What