we must tell him
our plans, Austin--in strict confidence?" She did not wait for an
answer, but went on to him immediately: "I'll speak to you on the terms
on which you have already heard me--as though I were in the
confessional."

"What you are pleased to say is safe--but it's your deeds I want, not
your words."

"My words will make my deeds plain to you," she answered, and then sat
silent for a while, resting her cheek on her hand, looking very steadily
in his face. At last she spoke in a low even voice:

"I don't admit your authority; and yet, as Austin knows, I shrank from
this meeting. You claim the right to lay your hands on my very soul, to
tear it out and look at it. I don't like that. I resent it. And what
good does it do? We remain too far apart. I shall make to you no apology
for what I have done; I don't desire to defend myself. The thing is very
different to me, and you wouldn't even try to see the difference. Yet it
is not less a great thing to me--as great as to you, though different.
Yes, a great thing and a decisive one. I may look at it wrongly--I don't
look at it lightly."

"I'm glad to be able to think that--at least," he remarked.

"I like you, and I want to work with you in the future. That's why I've
listened to you, and why I now tell you what's in my mind--why I have
come face to face with you. There was no obligation on me; my soul's my
own, not yours, nor the world's. But I have chosen to do it. You came
here, Mr. Alison, to tell me that I was not a fit wife for Lord
Fillingford's son?"

He assented with a nod and a gentle motion of his hand.

"I agree with you there--with all you've said about that--but I go much
farther. I don't think myself a fit wife for any man's son."

He looked up at her with a quick jerk of his head.

"I could go to no man as his wife without telling my story. And if I
told it, what would he say? He might say, 'Go away!' Probably most men
would, though there are some I know who, I think, would not. Or he might
say, 'That's all over--forget all that. Be happy with me.' If he said
that, what should I answer? I should have to say, 'It's not all over;
it's not a wretched thing in the past that I've bitterly repented of and
may now hope to be allowed to forget and to be forgiven for. It's not
over and never will be. For me it's decisive; it will always be there.
And it will always be there for you, too, and you will hate it.'" She
spoke the last words with a stro