He sat still, waiting, and she pressed on: "Do such things
happen to men often?"
The quiet room seemed to resound with the long
reverberations of her question. She looked away from him,
and he released her and stood up.
"I don't know what happens to other men. Such a thing never
happened to me..."
She turned her eyes back to his face. She felt like a
traveller on a giddy path between a cliff and a precipice:
there was nothing for it now but to go on.
"Had it...had it begun...before you met her in Paris?"
"No; a thousand times no! I've told you the facts as they
were."
"All the facts?"
He turned abruptly. "What do you mean?"
Her throat was dry and the loud pulses drummed in her
temples.
"I mean--about her...Perhaps you knew...knew things about
her...beforehand."
She stopped. The room had grown profoundly still. A log
dropped to the hearth and broke there in a hissing shower.
Darrow spoke in a clear voice. "I knew nothing, absolutely
nothing," he said.
She had the answer to her inmost doubt--to her last shameful
unavowed hope. She sat powerless under her woe.
He walked to the fireplace and pushed back the broken log
with his foot. A flame shot out of it, and in the upward
glare she saw his pale face, stern with misery.
"Is that all?" he asked.
She made a slight sign with her head and he came slowly back
to her.
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