Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/313

 and more, because—because—but I'll come to the reason later. I won't say more about it now.

"Millicent and I were going to walk home. She refused Nina's offer to send us back. She wanted to walk, she said; and when we'd left the house, she explained that she had something to tell me. When she added that it was very hard to tell, and I saw that she looked pale and distressed, I asked if it couldn't wait till another time, as we had to go home to see you and Maud. No, she answered, the thing must be said before we saw you. Then she suggested that we should walk by way of the Tower. She would be thinking over all the details of a story she had to tell, and the plateau of the Tower would be a good place to tell it, for it was so quiet there, one never need be afraid of meeting anybody.

"She was sometimes a little moody and morbid, so I didn't pay very great attention to her forebodings, even when she said that perhaps when I'd heard all I would hate her. She often asked me to repeat that I was really fond of her, making me say it over and over, and I could do so with truth. I'd never made any pretence from the first, of loving her as a man ought to love his wife, but I was genuinely fond of her, and the rest couldn't be helped—as she'd known long ago, from the day we first spoke of marrying. She was staying in this hotel with her mother then. It is where I met her first. Now you know why I'm here now.