went on, "because I want the time that remains to us to be as perfect as possible. I want you to know that while I was a good and faithful wife to Robert, and made him, I believe, very happy, I loved you. I bear him no ill will. He acted according to his lights, believing, then, that all was fair in love. That doesn't make his act less detestable, but I must weigh in the scales against that, the fact that he was the best of husbands and fathers. And I forgave him absolutely. But, oh, Stephen! All those years . . . all those years were one long struggle against my love for you!"
There are moments too great or too poignant for speech. He did not know, then, whether the pain or the happiness of this new knowledge was the stronger. For a moment the pain had the upper hand.
"It is a tragedy!" he said at last. "A tragedy!"
Presently he turned to her again.
"But when he died?" he asked. "When I came to you again? Why did you say no?"
Madame Claire hesitated before she spoke.
"My reasons," she said, "may have seemed to you to be poor ones. I pleaded my age, I remember, and the fact—or what I believed was a fact—that it would have been an elderly folly for us
