Callandar drew a sharp breath and shook himself as if to throw off the horror of some enthralling nightmare.

“You married him—­this man—­knowing that you were a wife already?”

“A fine sort of wife!” He quivered at the coarseness of meaning in her tone.  “We were never really married.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that it was all a farce.  What’s a ceremony?  For all I knew it wasn’t even legal.  When you did not answer my letter I thought that was what your silence meant.  I asked a girl to ask her father who was a lawyer if a marriage was legal when the girl was under age and the parents didn’t know about it.  He said sometimes it wasn’t.”

Callandar groaned.  “And you married again—­on that?”

“Yes.  I had to, anyway.  I couldn’t hold out against mother.  I daren’t tell her.  She left us after the wedding, when the mine failed, and went back to Cleveland.  It was there she must have got your letter, and the note I found last night.  And when you came, she told you I was dead—­to save the scandal.  She was always different after that, though I never guessed why.  It was a lie, you see, and mother was terrified of telling lies.  It was the only thing she was afraid of.  She believed that liars go to hell.”

The tone in which she spoke of the probable torment of her mother was quite without feeling.  Callandar listened in fascinated wonder.  Was this Molly?—­Pretty, kind-hearted Molly?

“I cannot understand,” he said in a stifled voice.  “It is all too horrible!  This man you married—­”

“He is dead.  He died a year ago.  I thought at first that you must have found out and that was why you came.  I should have died of fright if you had come while he was alive.  He would never have understood—­never!  He didn’t like mother but he wasn’t afraid of her.  And I think that at last he suspected that she had made me marry him for his money.  But he was always good.  At first I was afraid all the time—­oh, it was dreadful!  I think I have always been afraid—­all my life—­” Without warning she threw her hands out wildly and broke into choking sobs, crying with the abandon of a frightened child.  Yet no one could have mistaken the impulse of her grief.  It was for herself she wept.

Was it possible that she was a child still?  A child in spite of her woman’s knowledge, and the dulled lustre of her hair?  Callandar remembered grimly that Molly’s views of right and wrong had always been peculiarly simple.  She had never wished to do wrong, but when she had done it, it had never seemed so very wrong to her.  Her greatest dread had always been the dread of other people’s censure.

“Don’t cry,” he said gently.

She must have felt the change in his voice, for although her sobs redoubled she did not again shrink from the hand he laid upon her hair.  It was all over.  She had told him the truth.  Surely he must see that he was the one to blame, not she.