point of seeing no less of him
than I had always done. Then we came to England and to White Gables, and
after that followed--my husband's dreadful end.'

She threw out her right hand in a gesture of finality. 'You know about
the rest--so much more than any other man,' she added, and glanced up at
him with a quaint expression.

Trent wondered at that look, but the wonder was only a passing shadow on
his thought. Inwardly his whole being was possessed by thankfulness. All
the vivacity had returned to his face. Long before the lady had ended
her story he had recognized the certainty of its truth, as from the
first days of their renewed acquaintance he had doubted the story that
his imagination had built up at White Gables, upon foundations that
seemed so good to him.

He said, 'I don't know how to begin the apologies I have to make. There
are no words to tell you how ashamed and disgraced I feel when I realize
what a crude, cock-sure blundering at a conclusion my suspicion was.
Yes, I suspected--you! I had almost forgotten that I was ever such
a fool. Almost--not quite. Sometimes when I have been alone I have
remembered that folly, and poured contempt on it. I have tried to
imagine what the facts were. I have tried to excuse myself.'

She interrupted him quickly. 'What nonsense! Do be sensible, Mr Trent.
You had only seen me on two occasions in your life before you came to me
with your solution of the mystery.' Again the quaint expression came and
was gone. 'If you talk of folly, it really is folly for a man like you
to pretend to a woman like me that I had innocence written all over
me in large letters--so large that you couldn't believe very strong
evidence against me after seeing me twice.'

'What do you mean by "a man like me"?' he demanded with a sort of
fierceness. 'Do you take me for a person without any normal instincts?
I don't say you impress people as a simple, transparent sort of
character--what Mr Calvin Bunner calls a case of open-work; I don't say
a stranger might not think you capable of wickedness, if there was good
evidence for it: but I say that a man who, after seeing you and being
in your atmosphere, could associate you with the particular kind of
abomination I imagined, is a fool--the kind of fool who is afraid to
trust his senses.... As for my making it hard for you to approach
the subject, as you say, it is true. It was simply moral cowardice. I
understood that you wished to clear the matter up