elpless, flinching before the
steady scrutiny of the blue eyes.

"_Please tell me_."

"Teresa, I--wondered! It troubled me. Lately I felt sure. I was sorry
it had been arranged to come here together. I tried to alter it; you
know I tried... Did _you_ never suspect?"

Teresa hesitated. The colour had faded from her cheek, but she was
still calm and collected.

"Not--_that_! I knew he admired her--that was of course. I knew he
liked to be with her whenever he could. Once or twice I felt--lonely!
But she was married.--I never dreamt of this. I have read of men
falling in love with married women, but I have never known it in real
life. I did not think he was that sort." Scorn spoke in her voice, a
youthful intolerance and contempt. It was not only on her own account
that she was suffering. Peignton had been to her the ideal man, and the
ideal had fallen. The whole structure of life seemed shaken under her
feet.

Grizel looked at her, with a saddened glance.

"Poor, dear, little girl! It's hard for you, but you must try to
understand. You've lived in a very sheltered little corner, dear, where
the difficult things of life have been hidden away out of sight. It's
hard for you to be quite fair, and see the other point of view as well
as your own. But you must try. You mustn't condemn poor Dane. He was
engaged to you, and he has fallen in love with another woman. It sounds
bad enough on the face of it, but you and I who know him, and have
watched him these last months, know that there has been nothing
deliberate about it, nothing guilty or underhand. He was engaged to you
and he was faithful to you--in intent. He wanted to be faithful. The
other thing was just a great trial wave which overtook him and swept him
off his feet."

Teresa set her lips, her face hard and cold.

"It could not have swept him, if he had been firm! If he had been
faithful to me, he could not have noticed any other woman in that way.
I never noticed another man. I don't understand it."

Grizel sighed. The youthful arrogance of the girl was at once pitiful
and menacing. To her there existed but the two hard lines, a right and
a wrong, the maze of intersecting paths had no existence in her eyes.
Her judgment, like that of all young untried things, was relentlessly
hard.

Grizel sat looking at her, pondering what to say.

"When you first knew Cassandra you were fascinated by her. You felt a
longing to see her agai