Afterwards

"Certainly there isn't much going on." Anstice was puzzled by her manner. "Do I understand that you 'belong' here, as the country folks say?"

She put down her cup rather suddenly, and faced him squarely, her blue eyes full of a resolution which added several years to her age.

"Dr. Anstice." Her deep voice had lost its richness and sounded hard. "I should like to tell you something of myself. Oh"--she laughed rather cynically--"I'm not going to bore you with a rhapsody intended to convey to you that I am a much misunderstood woman and all the rest of it. Only, if you are to see me again, I think I should like you to know just who and what I am."

Mystified, Anstice bowed.

"Whatever you tell me I shall be proud to hear--and keep to myself," he said.

"Thanks." Her manner had lost its slight animation and was once more weary, indifferent. "Well, first of all, have you ever seen me before?"

"No. Though I confess that something in your face seemed familiar to me last night."

"Oh." She did not seem much impressed. "Well, to put it differently, have you ever heard of me?"

"No," said Anstice. "To the best of my belief I have never heard your name before."

"I see. Well, I will tell you who I am, and what I am supposed to have done." No further warmth enlivened her manner, which throughout was cold, almost, one would have said, absent. "When I was eighteen I married Major Carstairs, a soldier a good many years older than myself. Presently I went out to India with him, and lived there for four years, coming home when our child was three years old."

She paused.

"I came here--this was my husband's old home--and settled down with Cherry. And when I had been in the parish a year or so, there was a scandal in Littlefield."

She stopped, and her mouth quivered into a faint smile.

"Oh, I was not the chief character--at first! It was a case in which the Vicar's wife won an unenviable notoriety. It seemed there had been a secret in her life, years before when she was a pretty, silly girl, which was known to very few besides her husband and, I presume, her own people. Now you would not think I was a sympathetic person--one in whom a sentimental, rather neurotic woman would confide. Would you?"