"Do you suppose that I wished to interfere between you and your wife? Of course I told her that you ought to know. Of course I told her that you ought to have known it already. But she excused herself,--with great sorrow. Things had presented themselves in such a way that the desired opportunity of telling you had never come." He shook his head. "I tell you that it was so, and you are bound to believe it of one of whom in all other respects you had thought well;--of one who loved you with the fondest devotion. Instead of that there came this man with his insidious falsehoods, with his implied lies; this man, of whom you have always thought so badly;--and him you believed instead! I tell you that you can justify yourself before no human being. You were not entitled to repudiate your wife for such offence as she had committed, you are not entitled even had there been no mutual affection to bind you together. How much less so in your present condition,--and in hers. People will only excuse you by saying that you were mad. And now in order to put yourself right, you expect that she shall come forward, and own herself to have been the cause of this misfortune. I tell you that she will not do it. I would not even ask her to do it;--not for her sake, nor for your own." "I am then to go," said he, "and grovel in the dust before her feet." "There need be no grovelling. There need be no confessions." "How then?" "Go to Exeter, and simply take her. Disregard what all the world may say, for the sake of her happiness and for your own. She will make no stipulation. She will simply throw herself into your arms with unaffected love. Do not let her have to undergo the suffering of bringing forth your child without the comfort of knowing that you are near to her." Then she left him to think in solitude over the words she had spoken to him.