which had for months been gathering
strength, and which now mastered him completely, persisted. He knew not
what he did or said.

"And you haven't seen him to-day, I suppose," he cried.

"Yes, I have seen him to-day."

"Ah, you have! I thought as much. Where did you meet him to-day?"

Victoria turned half away from him, raised a hand to the mantel-shelf
again, and lifted a foot to the low brass fender as she looked down into
the fire. The movement was not part of a desire to evade him, as he
fancied in his anger, but rather one of profound indifference, of
profound weariness--the sunless deeps of sorrow. And he thought her
capable of deceiving him! He had been her constant companion from
childhood, and knew only the visible semblance of her face, her form, her
smile. Her sex was the sex of subterfuge.

"I went to the place where he is living, and asked for him," she said,
"and he came out and spoke to me."

"You?" he repeated incredulously. There was surely no subterfuge in her
tone, but an unreal, unbelievable note which his senses seized, and to
which he clung. "You! My daughter!"

"Yes," she answered, "I, your daughter. I suppose you think I am
shameless. It is true--I am."

Mr. Flint was utterly baffled. He was at sea. He had got beyond the range
of his experience; defence, denial, tears, he could have understood and
coped with. He crushed the telegrams into a tighter ball, sought for a
footing, and found a precarious one.

"And all this has been going on without my knowledge, when you knew my
sentiments towards the man?"

"Yes," she said. "I do not know what you include in that remark, but I
have seen him many times as many times, perhaps, as you have heard
about."

He wheeled, and walked over to a cabinet between two of the great windows
and stood there examining a collection of fans which his wife had bought
at a famous sale in Paris. Had he suddenly been asked the question, he
could not have said whether they were fans or beetles. And it occurred to
Victoria, as her eyes rested on his back, that she ought to be sorry for
him--but wasn't, somehow. Perhaps she would be to-morrow. Mr. Flint
looked at the fans, and an obscure glimmering of the truth came to him
that instead of administering a severe rebuke to the daughter he believed
he had known all his life, he was engaged in a contest with the soul of a
woman he had never known. And the more she confessed, the more she
apparently yielded, the more i