Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/309

 sent me to him for a purpose. Help me to carry it out, whatever it may be."

"One doesn't atone so easily," she said aloud. "You hurt me once, dreadfully, Ian. I have got over that—won past it. Surely you wouldn't hurt me so much more cruelly, in the end? What have I done to you that you should?"

"That is all but the most terrible part of it. You have done nothing," he groaned. "I thought always that you had, till that day—the day of her death. Then she confessed. I knew the truth for the first time—the truth about you in the past."

"She—confessed? Oh, but, Ian, it's the weaker side of me that questions you! What does the past really matter, between you and me?" Terry spoke so gently that her words, as they fell, were like balm. Yet for some wounds there is no balm.

The past came up that day between my wife and me—and killed her," Sir Ian answered. He turned to the table under a green-shaded gas lamp, and pointed to a quantity of sheets of paper, closely covered with his fine, rather scholarly handwriting. "I was writing out my statement," he went on. "You will be surprised, perhaps, that I didn't do it at once—after her death. But—Terry, until a few days ago I thought it more than possible that Ian Barr was guilty. I loved the fellow and wanted to save him."