"I wish I didn't have to," responded the doctor kindly, and laid a soothing hand on the shoulder of the distressed husband, "but I must tell you what I see from the full narrative of her behavior which you have given and the unusually informing glimpses of her own mental state which she afforded me last night. To resume: she had remained loyal, never allowing you to suspect the truth, herself perhaps so unwilling to believe it that she is hardly aware of itnow. Lacking that steadfastness of will of which we spoke, she has lacked steadfastness to make the deliberate plunge out of your life which her love impels."
"Doctor! You are wrong—all wrong!" George insisted. "If any other person than yourself had intimated what you have this morning, I should be twisting his head off now."
He stood stupefied, one hand tearing at his hair, the fingers of the other working nervously, while the full extent of what the doctor had so delicately but clearly intimated went crashing through his consciousness.
"Fool! Fool! Fool!" he accused himself. "Poor, doting, trusting fool!" And then, oddly enough, he thought of his wife sympathetically. "Poor, poor little Fay! So white—so clean—so pure! Oh, this is horrible! Horrible!" But a sense of his own wrongs came back to him.
