e matter
which estranges us should be discovered and be discussed. It will
save me hereafter, perhaps, from being pointed out as a woman who
so trusted and was so deceived. It may shield my life altogether
from some notoriety: I could be grateful for that!"

She was thinking of her family name, and of the many proud eyes
that were turned upon her in the present and out of the past.
There was a sting for her in the remembrance and the sting passed
into her concluding words:

"I do not forget that when I ask you to do all this, I, who am not
given to practising deception, am asking you to go on practising
yours. I am urging you to shirk the consequences of your
wrong-doing--to enjoy in the world an untarnished name after you
have tarnished your life. Do not think I forget that! Still I beg
you to do as I say. This is another of the humiliations you have
led me to: that although I am separated from you by all that once
united us, I must remain partner with you in the concealment of a
thing that would ruin you if it were known."

She turned to him as though she experienced full relief through her
hard and cruel words:

"Do I understand, then, that this is to be buried away by you--and
by me--from the knowledge of the world?"

"No one else has any right to know it. I have told you that."

"Then that is all!"

She gave a quick dismissal to the subject, so putting an end to the
interview.

She started to rise from her seat; but impulses, new at the
instant, checked her: all the past checked her, all that she was
herself and all that he had been to her.

Perhaps what at each moment had angered her most was the fact that
she was speaking, not he. She knew him to be of the blood of
silent men and to have inherited their silence. This very trait of
his had rendered association with him so endearing. Love had been
so divinely apart from speech, either his or her own: most intimate
for having been most mute. But she knew also that he was capable
of speech, full and strong and quick enough upon occasion; and her
heart had cried out that in a lifetime this was the one hour when
he should not have given way to her or allowed her to say a
word--when he should have borne her down with uncontrollable
pleading.

It was her own work that confronted her and she did not recognize
it. She had exhausted resources to convince him of her
determination to cast him off at once; to render it plain that
further parley woul