He said: “To my certain knowledge, the informant has never told an untruth, at least not in the years I have known Said Informant, which is a long time. Write to me at once if you can clear yourself. Bale has shown himself utterly reprehensible, and I will attend to him in due time if I survive. Of course I am writing nothing of this to my parents. Your reply awaited with the utmost eagerness. Deeply wronged, but still Your Husband. Capt. Tyler Fanning. 72 P.V.”

Dan realized that he was saying, rapidly, driving himself to say it … his throat grown raw: “Look here. I cannot understand this. The letter is dated June twenty-first, and he left here on Sunday the fourteenth. We—it was that night, and—This letter of which he speaks—why,” he cried, “it must have reached his camp as soon as he did!”

“They’ve moved. A long way. The regiment was near Fredericksburg, before, and Thoroughfare Gap is a long way from there. I searched it out on the map.” Her mouth blurred, the lips bleached and quavering. “I felt I should bring the letter to you.”

He said, “That’s right and just.” He wanted to say more, to tell her how totally unjust the whole situation was … rage began to sparkle across his brain. “Now, listen,” he was saying, roughly, “this has come as we might have supposed it would come. You must divorce him. There’s no use in haggling merely because Tyler is in the army. You have suffered enough at his hands before this. Is there any reason for you to be defamed by some—”

Her face was more brittle and white than he had ever seen it. “You know that it is all very true.”

“This is no common infidelity! How could you be unfaithful to a faith which never existed?”

“Maybe,” she said, “it existed for Tyler. Maybe I didn’t recognize its existence for him.”

The candle trickled its pennant from side to side; their thin shadows grew and blurred, dissolved, grew once more on the faded wall paper … The girl still stood behind the tall chair, facing him. He had the grotesque thought that she was a prisoner in a dock made of Windsor spindles. “Do you love him? I ask that for the first time. When you were—hysterical—you told me that you didn’t love him. Now you must tell me again.”

She shook her head. “I don’t feel toward Tyler as I do toward you.” The blue shadows hunted up from the hollow of her bosom, washed across her set, stubborn face. “I don’t—wish him, as I have wished you. I don’t—” She whispered, “Please don’t make me go on.”