drew back and
waited.

"Stuart, Stuart," she told him, "it's all so bleak--ahead! There are
things that I must say to you, too, but I can't say them now. We can't
sit here talking like this. It's like talking over the body of our dead
happiness."

"I know," he replied in a strained voice. "It's just like that."

"I'm going to my room," she declared. "Perhaps I can write it all more
easily than I can say it. Do you mind?"

"No." He shook his head. "I think it's better--but you must sleep
to-night. Have you anything to take?"

"I have trional--but maybe I won't need it."

He closed the windows and shot the bolt of the front door; then, at the
head of the stairs, they both paused.

"I would like to kiss you good-night," he said with a queer smile,
"but--"

"But what?" she asked, and with their eyes meeting in full honesty he
answered: "But--I don't dare."

Conscience's own room was at the front and right of the house,
overlooking the cove and the road. Stuart's was at the back and left,
separated by the length of the hall and by several rooms now empty.

For a long while after she had switched on her lights the woman sat in
an attitude of limp and tearless distress. She could not yet attack the
task of that letter which was to explain so much.

But finally she made a beginning.

"Dearest," she wrote, "(because it would only be dishonest to call
you anything else), I am trying to write the things I couldn't say
to you. You know and I know that if we acknowledged loving each
other, when I have no right to love you, at least it has been a
love that has been innocent in everything except its existence.
When we look back on it, and try, as we must, to forget it, there
will be no ghosts of guilty remembrance to haunt us. We loved each
other in childhood, almost, and we loved each other until we let a
misunderstanding separate us. I'm afraid, dear, I shall always love
you, and yet I shall be more proud than ashamed when I look back on
this time here together. Perhaps I should be ashamed of loving you
at all, while I am the wife of a man who is good and who trusts me.
But I am proud that you proved big enough to help me when I needed
you. I shall be proud that when I was too weak to fight for myself
you fought for me. I am proud that there was never a moment which
Eben might not have seen, or one which he would have resented.