Meanwhile an old woman loves you." He kissed her and left her.
At the door through the dark room he heard her thin voice: "May God bless you and keep you." He went to perform his hardest task.
2 It was the harder in that for a little while he seemed to be left absolutely alone.

The room was dark save for the leaping light of the fire in the deep stone fireplace, and as he saw Margaret standing there waiting for him, desperately courageous, he only knew that he loved her so badly that, for a little while, he could only stand there staring at her, twisting his hands together, speechless.
"Well," at last she said.

"Come and sit down and tell me all about it." But her voice trembled a little and her eyes were wide, frightened, begging him not to hurt her.
He sat down near her, before the fire, and she instinctively, as though she knew that this was a very tremendous matter, stood away from him, her hands clasped together against her black dress.
Suddenly now, before he spoke, he realized what it would mean to him if she could not forgive what he had done.

He had imagined it once before--the slow withdrawal of her eyes, the gradual tightening of the lips, the little instinctive movement away from him.
If he must go out into the world, having lost her, he thought that he could never endure, God or no God, the long dreary years in front of him.
At last he was brave: "Margaret--at first I want you to know that I love you with all my heart and soul and body; that nothing that can ever happen to me can ever alter that love--that I am yours, entirely, always.

And then I want you to know that I am not worthy to love you, that I ought never to have asked you to love me, that I ought to have gone away the first time that I saw you." She made a little loving, protecting movement towards him with her hands and then let them drop against her dress again.
"I ought never to have loved you--because--only a day or two before I met you--I had killed Carfax, Rupert's friend." The words as they fell seemed to him like the screams that iron bolts give as a gate is barred.
He whispered slowly the words again: "I killed Carfax"-- and then he covered his eyes with his hands so that he might not see her face.
The silence seemed eternal--and she had made no movement.