“Mary!” he said, breathless, and then paused. “How has all this come about? Why do I find you here? What does it mean? There are many explanations which I have a right to ask. You disappear from me--sent away--I know not how; and then--not to count the years that have passed--after these three months, in which you must have known me, I find you by chance----”
She knew that I was within hearing, and that whatever she said to him must be to me too. If that was a restraint upon her, I cannot tell. I felt sorry for her vaguely in my mind; but yet I did not move.
“I did not wish you to find me at all,” she said, very low. “Mr Durham, there is and can be nothing between you and me.”
“Nothing!” he said; “what do you mean, Mary? Why, there is all the past between us--a hundred things that cannot be undone by anything in the future. You know how many things there are connected with you which are a mystery to me--things not affecting you alone, but others. How you went away, for instance; and what became of you, and how much my mother had to do with it? You must have known the moment I found you that all these questions remained to be asked.”
“All these questions,” she said, “are made quite unimportant by two things. First, that I am the wife, though now the widow, of a man I loved dearly--and that you have begun to love, begun to think of, some one very different from me.”
“Ah!” he said, with a strange brief utterance of distress. Whether he was grieved to think of the wrong he was doing me, or whether the strange position he stood in troubled him, I cannot tell; but there was pain in the cry he gave--“ah!” with a little shiver. “You have abundance of power to pain me,” he said, very low, “but it seems strange you should upbraid me. Yes, I have begun to think of some one else; but that does not prevent me from being deeply startled, deeply moved, by the sight of you.”
There was a little silence then, and I came to myself slowly. I woke as it were out of a trance. She knew I was there, but he did not. I had no right to hear his secrets without warning him. I tried to get up, but could not at first. I felt stiff and weary, as if I had been travelling for days together. I could scarcely drag myself up from my chair. The sound I made in rising might have warned him, but I do not think he heard. Before I could drag myself to the door and show I was there, he had begun again.