Mrs. Manderson had lost all her air of hesitancy. She had, as she was wont to say, talked herself enthusiastic, and in the ardour of her purpose to annihilate the misunderstanding that had troubled her so long she felt herself mistress of the situation.
“I am going to tell you the story of the mistake you made,” she continued, as Trent, his hands clasped between his knees, still looked at her enigmatically. “You will have to believe it, Mr. Trent; it is utterly true to life, with its confusions and hidden things and cross-purposes and perfectly natural mistakes that nobody thinks twice about taking for facts. Please understand that I don’t blame you in the least, and never did, for jumping to the conclusion you did. You knew that I was estranged from my husband, and you knew what that so often means. You knew before I told you, I expect, that he had taken up an injured attitude towards me; and I was silly enough to try and explain it away. I gave you the explanation of it that I had given myself at first, before I realized the wretched truth; I told you he was disappointed in me because I couldn’t take a brilliant lead in society. Well, that was true; he was so. But I could see you weren’t convinced. You had guessed what it took me much longer to see, because I knew how irrational it was. Yes; my husband was jealous of John Marlowe; you divined that.
“Then I behaved like a fool when you let me see you had divined it; it was such a blow, you understand, when I had supposed all the humiliation and strain was at an end, and that his delusion had died with him. You practically asked me if my husband’s secretary was not my lover, Mr. Trent—I have to say it, because I want you to understand why I broke down and made a scene. You took that for a confession; you thought I was guilty of that, and I think you even thought I might be a party to the crime, that I had consented. … That did hurt me; but perhaps you couldn’t have thought anything else—I don’t know.”
Trent, who had not hitherto taken his eyes from her face, hung his head at the words. He did not raise it again as she continued. “But really it was simple shock and distress that made me give way, and the memory of all the misery that mad suspicion had meant to me. And when I pulled myself together again you had gone.”
She rose and went to an escritoire beside the window, unlocked a drawer, and drew out a long, sealed envelope.
“This is the manuscript you left with me,” she said. “I have read it through again and again. I have always wondered, as everybody does, at your cleverness in things of this kind.” A faintly mischievous smile flashed upon her face, and was gone. “I thought it was splendid, Mr. Trent—I almost forgot that the story was my own, I was so interested. And I want to say now, while I have this in my hand, how much I thank you for your generous, chivalrous act in sacrificing this triumph of yours rather than put a woman’s reputation in peril. If all had been as you supposed, the facts must have come out when the police took up the case you put in their hands. Believe me, I understood just what you had done, and I never ceased to be grateful even when I felt most crushed by your suspicion.”
As she spoke her thanks her voice shook a little, and her eyes were bright. Trent perceived nothing of this. His head was still bent. He did not seem to hear. She put the envelope into his hand as it lay open, palm upwards, on his knee. There was a touch of gentleness about the act which made him look up.
“Can you—” he began slowly.
She raised her hand as she stood before him. “No, Mr. Trent; let me finish before you say anything. It is such an unspeakable relief to me to have broken the ice at last, and I want to end the story while I am still feeling the triumph of beginning it.” She sank down into the sofa from which she had first risen. “I am telling you a thing that nobody else knows. Everybody knew, I suppose, that something had come between us, though I did everything in my power to hide it. But I don’t think anyone in the world ever guessed what my husband’s notion was. People who know me don’t think that sort of thing about me, I believe. And his fancy was so ridiculously opposed to the facts. I will tell you what the situation was. Mr. Marlowe and I had been friendly enough since he came to us. For all his cleverness—my husband said he had a keener brain than any man he knew—I looked upon him as practically a boy. You know I am a little older than he is, and he had a sort of amiable lack of ambition that made me feel it the more. One day my husband asked me what I thought was the best thing about Marlowe, and not thinking much about it I said, ‘His manners.’ He surprised me very much by looking black at that, and after a silence he said, ‘Yes, Marlowe is a gentleman; that’s so,’ not looking at me.
“Nothing was ever said about that again until about a year ago, when I found that Mr. Marlowe had done what I always expected he would do—fallen desperately in love with an American girl. But to my disgust
