She put her arms on the table, and hid her face in them. "Oh, I cannot bear it," she said.

He rose to his feet slowly. "If it is my presence here that hurts you, Kate, I will go away. It has been but a painful pleasure to come, and I have been forced to take it. You will acquit me of coming of my own choice, Kate. But I will not torment you. I will go away, and never come again."

She lifted her face, and said in a pa.s.sionate whisper, "Take me with you."

He shook his head. "That's impossible, Kate. You are married now. Your husband loves you dearly. He is a better man than I am, a thousand, thousand times."

"Do you think I don't know what he is?" she cried, throwing herself back. "That's why I can't live with him. It's killing me. I tell you I can't bear it," she cried, rising to her feet. "Love me! Haven't I tried to make myself love _him_. Haven't I tried to be a good wife! I can't--I can't. He never speaks but he torments me. Nothing can happen but it cuts me through and through. I can't live in this house. The walls are crushing me, the ceiling is falling on me, the air is stifling me. I tell you I shall die if you do not take me out of it. Take me, Philip, take me, take me!"

She caught him by the arm imploringly, but he only dropped his head down between both hands, saying in a deep thick voice, "Hush, Kate, hush! I cannot and I will not. You are mad to think of it."

Then she sank down into the chair again, breathless and inert, and sobbing deep, low sobs. The sound of dancing came from the hall, with cries of "Hooch!" and the voice of Pete shouting--

"Hit the floor with heel and toe 'Till heaven help the boords below."

"Yes, I am mad, or soon will be," she said in a hard way. "I thought of that this morning when I crossed the river coming home from church. It would soon be over _there_, I thought. No more trouble, no more dreams, no more waking in the night to hear the breathing of the one beside me, and the voice out of the darkness crying----"

"Kate, what are you saying?" interrupted Philip.

"Oh, you needn't think I'm a bad woman because I ask you take me away from my husband. If I were that, I could brazen it out perhaps, and live on here, and pretend to forget; many a woman does, they say. And I'm not afraid that he will ever find me out either. I have only to close my lips, and he will never know. But _I_ shall know, Philip Christian," she said, with a defiant look into his eyes as he raised them.

Her reproaches hurt him less than her piteous entreaties, and in a moment she was sobbing again. "Oh, what can G.o.d do but let me die! I thought He would when the child came; but He did not, and then--am I a wicked woman, after all?--I prayed that He would take my innocent baby, anyway."

But she dashed the tears away in anger at her weakness, and said, "I'm not a bad woman, Philip Christian; and that's why I won't live here any longer. There is something you have never guessed, and I have never told you; but I must tell you now, for I can keep my secret no longer."

He raised his head with a noise in his ears that was like the flapping of wings in the dark.

"Your secret, Kate?"

"How happy I was," she said. "Perhaps I was to blame--I loved you so, and was so fearful of losing you. Perhaps you thought of all that had pa.s.sed between us as something that would go back and back as time went on and on. But it has been coming the other way ever since. Yes, and as long as I live and as long as the child lives----"

Her voice quivered like the string of a bow and stopped. He rose to his feet.

"The child, Kate? Did you say the child?"

She did not answer at once, and then she muttered, with her head down, "Didn't I tell you there was something you had never guessed?"

"And is it that?" he said in a fearful whisper.

"Yes."

"You are sure? You are not deceiving yourself? This is not hysteria?"

"No."

"You mean that the child----"

"Yes."

His questions had come in gasps, like short breakers out of a rising sea; her answers had fallen like the minute-gun above it. Then, in the silence, Pete's voice came through the wall. He was singing a rough old ditty--

"It was to Covent Gardens I chanced for to go, To see some of the prettiest flowers which in the gardens grow."

Nancy came in with a scuttle of coals. "The lil one's asleep," she said, going down on her knees at the fire. She had left the door ajar, and Pete's song was rolling into the room--

"The first was lovely Nancy, so delicate and fair, The other was a vargin, and she did laurels wear."

"Grannie bathed her, and she's like a lil angel in the cot there," said Nancy. "And, 'Dear heart alive, Grannie,' says I,' the straight she's like her father when she's sleeping.'"

Nancy brushed the hearth and went off. As she closed the door, Pete's voice ebbed out.

Philip's lips trembled, his eyes wandered over the floor, he grew very pale, he tried to speak and could not. All his self-pride was overthrown in a moment The honour in which he had tried to stand erect as in a suit of armour was stripped away. Unwittingly he had been laying up an account with Nature. He had forgotten that a sin has consequences.

Nature did not forget. She had kept her own reckoning. He had struggled to believe that after all he was a moral man, a free man; but Nature was a sterner moralist; she had chained him to the past, she had held him to himself.

He was still by the fire with his head down. "Did you know this before you were married to Pete?" he asked, without looking up.

"Hadn't I wronged him enough without that?" she answered.

"But did you think of it as something that might perhaps occur?"

"And if I did, what then?"

"If you had told me, Kate, nothing and n.o.body should have come between us--no," he said in a decisive voice, "not Pete nor all the world."

"And wasn't it your own duty to remember? Was it for me to come to you and say, 'Philip, something may happen, I am frightened.'"

Was this the compulsion that had driven her into marriage with the wrong man? Was it all hysteria? Could she be sure? In any case she could not think this awful thought and continue to live with her husband.

"You are right," he said, with his head still down. "You cannot live here any longer. This life of deception must end."

"Then you will take me away, Philip?"

"I must, G.o.d forgive me, I must. I thought it would be sin. But _that_ was long ago. It will be punishment. If I had known before--and I have been coming here time and again--looking on his happiness--but if I had once dreamt--and then only an hour ago--the oath at its baptism--O G.o.d!"

Her tears were flowing again, but a sort of serenity had fallen on her now.

"Forgive me," she whispered. "I tried to keep it to myself------"

"You could not keep it; you ought never to have kept it so long; the finger of G.o.d Himself ought to have burnt it out of you."

He spoke harshly, and she felt pain; but there was a secret joy as well.

"I am ruining you, Philip," she said, leaning over him.

"We are both drifting to ruin, Katherine," he answered hoa.r.s.ely. He was an abandoned hulk, with anchorage gone and no hand at the helm--broken, blind, rolling to destruction.

"I can offer you nothing, Kate, nothing but a hidden life, a life in the dark. If you come to me you will leave a husband who worships you for one to whom your life can never be joined. You will exchange a life of respect by the side of a good man for a life of humiliation, a life of shame. How can it be otherwise now? It is too late, too late!"