“I!” Thresk exclaimed.

“Yes, you who sit in judgment.  I am not alone.  No, I am not alone.  A crime was committed?  Then you must shoulder your portion of the blame.”

Thresk asked himself in vain what was his share.  He had done a cowardly thing years ago a few miles from this spot.  He had never ceased to reproach himself for the cowardice.  But that it had lived and worked like some secret malady until in the end it had made him an all-unconscious accomplice in that midnight tragedy, a sharer in its guilt, if guilt there were—­here again was news for him.  But the knowledge which her first words had given to him, that all these years he had never got the truth of her, kept him humble now.  He ceased to be judge.  He became pupil and as pupil he answered her.

“I am ready to shoulder it.”

He was seated on a cushioned bench which stood behind the writing-table and Stella sat down at his side.

“When we parted—­that morning—­it was in the drawing-room over there in my cottage.  We parted, you to your work of getting on, Henry, I to think of you getting on without me at your side.  There was a letter lying on the table, a letter from India.  Jane Repton had written it and she asked me to go out to her for the cold weather.  I went.  I was a young girl, lonely and very unhappy, and as young girls often do who are lonely and very unhappy I drifted into marriage.”

“I see,” said Thresk in a hushed voice.  The terrible conviction grew upon him now, lurid as the breaking of a day of storm, that the cowardice he had shown on Bignor Hill ruined her altogether and hurt him not at all.  “Yes, I see.  There my share begins.”

“Oh no.  Not yet,” she answered.  “Then I spoke when I should have kept silence.  I let my heart go out when I should have guarded it.  No, I cannot blame you.”

“You have the right none the less.”

But Stella would not excuse herself now and to him by any subtlety or artifice.

“No:  I married.  That was my affair.  I was beaten—­despised—­ridiculed—­terrified by a husband who drank secretly and kept all his drunkenness for me.  That, too, was my affair.  But I might have gone on.  For seven years it had lasted.  I was settling into a dull habit of misery.  I might have gone on being bullied and tortured had not one little thing happened to push me over the precipice.”

“And what was that?” asked Thresk.

“Your visit to me at Chitipur,” she replied, and the words took his breath away.  Why, he had travelled to Chitipur merely to save her.  He leaned forward eagerly but she anticipated him.  She smiled at him with an indulgent forgiveness.  “Oh, why did you come?  But I know.”

“Do you?” Thresk asked.  Here at all events she was wrong.

“Yes.  You came because of that one weak soft spot of sentimentalism there is in all of you, the strongest, the hardest.  You are strong for years.  You live alone for years.  Then comes the sentimental moment and it’s we who suffer, not you.”