He smiled. "Well, I'll be content so long as you care for me in any way--your way. I think your way's a mistake; but I won't insist on that. I'll do my best to adapt my way to yours, that's all." Her face was very still. Under their deep lids her eyes brooded, as if trying to see the truth inside herself. "No--no," she moaned. "I haven't told you the truth. I believe there is _no_ way in which I can care for you again. Or--well--I can care perhaps--I'm caring now--but--" "I see. You do not love me." She shook her head. "No. I know what love is, and--I do not love you." "If you don't love me, of course there's nothing more to be said." "Yes, there is. There's one thing that I have kept from you." "Well," he said, "you may as well let me have it. There's no good keeping things from me." "I had meant to spare you." At that he laughed. "Oh, don't spare me." She still hesitated. "What is it?" She spoke low. "If you had been here--that night--Peggy would not have died." He drew a quick breath. "What makes you think that?" he said quietly. "She overstrained her heart with crying. As you know. She was crying for you. And you were not there. Nothing would make her believe that you were not dead." She saw the muscles of his face contract with sudden pain. He looked at her gravely. The look expressed his large male contempt for her woman's cruelty; also a certain luminous compassion. "Why have you told me this?" he said. "I've told you, because I think the thought of it may restrain you when nothing else will." "I see. You mean to say, you believe I killed her?" Anne closed her eyes. CHAPTER XXXVI He did not know whether he believed what she had said, nor whether she believed it herself, neither could he understand her motive in saying it. At intervals he was profoundly sorry for her. Pity for her loosened, from time to time, the grip of his own pain. He told himself that she must have gone through intolerable days and nights of misery before she could bring herself to say a thing like that. Her grief excused her. But he knew that, if he had been in her place, she in his, he the saint and she the sinner, and that, if he had known her through her sin to be responsible for the child's death, there was no misery on earth that could have made him charge her with it. Further than that he could not understand her. The suddenness and cruelty of the blow had brutalised his imagination. He got up and stretched himself, to shake off the oppression that weighed on him like an unwholesome sleep. As he rose he felt a queer feeling in his head, a giddiness, a sense of obstruction in his brain. He went into the dining-room, and poured himself out a small quantity of whiskey, measuring it with the accuracy of abstemious habit. The dose had become necessary since his nerves had been unhinged by worry and the shock of Peggy's death. This time he drank it almost undiluted.