her face.

The silence seemed eternal--and she had made no movement. To fill that
silence he went on desperately--

"I had always hated him--there were many reasons--and one day we met
in Sannet Wood, quarrelled, and I hit him. The blow killed him. I don't
think I meant to kill him, but I wasn't sorry afterwards--I have never
felt remorse for _that_. There have been other things. . . .

"Soon afterwards I met you--I loved you at once--you know that I
did--and I could not tell you. Oh! I tried--I struggled, pretty poor
struggling--but I could not. I thought that it was all over, that he
was dead and nobody knew. But God was wiser than that--Rupert knew. He
suspected and then he grew more sure, and at last he was quite certain.
Yesterday, after the football match, I told him and I promised him that
I would tell you . . . and I have told you."

Silence again--and then suddenly there was movement, and there were arms
about him and a voice in his ear--"Poor, poor Olva . . . dear Olva . . .
how terrible it must have been!"

He could only then catch her and hold her, and furiously press her
against him. "Oh, my dear, my dear--you don't mind!"

They stayed together, like that, for a long time.

He could not think clearly, but in the dim recesses of his mind he saw
that they had all--Mrs. Craven, Margaret, Rupert--taken it in the same
kind of way. Could it be that Margaret and Rupert living, although
unconsciously, in the shadow all their lives of just this crime,
breathing the air of it, and breathing it too with the other air of love
and affection--that they had thus, all unknowing, been quietly prepared?

Or had they, each of them, their especial reason for excusing it?
Mrs. Craven from her great knowledge, Rupert from his great weariness,
Margaret from her great love?

At last Margaret got up and sat down in a chair away from him.

"Olva dear, you ought to have told me. If we had married and you had not
told me---"

"I was so terribly afraid of losing you."

"But it gives me now," her voice was almost triumphant, "something to
share with you, something to help you in, something to fight with you.
Now I can show you how much I love you.

"How could you have supposed that I would mind? Do you think that a
woman, if she loves a man, cares for anything that he may do? If you
had killed a hundred men in Sannet Wood I would have helped you to bury
them. The thing that a woman demands most of love is that she may pro