"Yes, I will," he said. "I must. I suppose--there is a sort of hysteric luxury in--confession. He did it because there was nothing else left. The foundations of his world had been torn from under his feet. Everything was gone." His voice broke into a savage cry. "Oh! in one short lifetime--the black misery a man can bring about!" "Yes," said Miss Amory. He threw himself into a chair near her. "For years--years," he said, "he hid a secret." Miss Amory bent forward. She felt she must help him a little--for pity's sake. "Was it the secret of Margery?" she half whispered. "Did you know it?" "When a woman has spent a long life alone, thinking--thinking," she answered, "she has had time to learn to observe and to work at problems. The day she fainted in the street and I took her home in my carriage, I began to fear--to guess. She was not only a girl who was ill--she was a child who was being _killed_ with some horror; she was heart-breaking. I used to go and see her. In the end I knew." "I--did not," he said, looking at her with haggard eyes. There was a long pause. She knew he had told her all in the one sentence--all she had guessed. "She did not know I knew," she went on, presently. "She believed no one knew. Oh, I tell you again, she was heart-breaking! She did not know that there were wild moments when she dropped words that could be linked into facts and formed into a chain." "Had you formed it," he asked, "when you wrote and told me she had died?" "Yes. It had led me to you--to nothing more. I felt death had saved her from what would have been worse. It seemed as if--the blackest devil--would be glad to know." "I am the blackest devil, perhaps," he said, with stony helplessness, "but when I received your letter I was grovelling on my knees praying that I might get back to her--and atone--as far as a black devil could." "And she was _dead_," said Miss Amory, wringing her hands together on her lap; "dead--dead." She stopped suddenly and turned on him. "He killed himself," she cried, "because he found out that it was _you_!" "Yes. I was the one man he loved--he had told his secret to me--to _me!_--the black devil. Now--now I must go to his mother, day after day, and be her son--because I was his friend--and knew his love for Margery--and of her sweetness--and her happy, peaceful death. He used to talk to me for hours; she--poor, tender soul--will talk to me again--of Margery--Margery--Margery--and of Lucien, whose one happiness I was." "It will--almost--be--enough," said Miss Amory, slowly. "Yes," he answered; "it will almost be enough--even for a black devil." And he turned on his chair and laid his face on his folded arms and sobbed like a woman. CHAPTER XLII