don't understand you now," said Benyon.

She looked at him a moment. "I adored you."

"I could damn you with a word!" he went on.

The moment he had spoken she grasped his arm and held up her other hand,
as if she were listening to a sound outside the room. She had evidently
had an inspiration, and she carried it into instant effect She swept
away to the door, flung it open, and passed into the hall, whence her
voice came back to Benyon as she addressed a person who was apparently
her husband. She had heard him enter the house at his habitual hour,
after his long morning at business; the closing of the door of the
vestibule had struck her ear. The parlor was on a level with the hall,
and she greeted him without impediment. She asked him to come in and be
introduced to Captain Benyon, and he responded with due solemnity. She
returned in advance of him, her eyes fixed upon Benyon and lighted
with defiance, her whole face saying to him, vividly: "Here is your
opportunity; I give it to you with my own hands. Break your promise and
betray me if you dare! You say you can damn me with a word: speak the
word and let us see!"

Benyon's heart beat faster, as he felt that it was indeed a chance; but
half his emotion came from the spectacle--magnificent in its way--of her
unparalleled impudence. A sense of all that he had escaped in not
having had to live with her rolled over him like a wave, while he looked
strangely at Mr. Roy, to whom this privilege had been vouchsafed. He saw
in a moment his successor had a constitution that would carry it.
Mr. Roy suggested squareness and solidity; he was a broadbased,
comfortable, polished man, with a surface in which the rank tendrils
of irritation would not easily obtain a foothold. He had a broad,
blank face, a capacious mouth, and a small, light eye, to which, as
he entered, he was engaged in adjusting a double gold-rimmed glass.
He approached Benyon with a prudent, civil, punctual air, as if he
habitually met a good many gentlemen in the course of business, and
though, naturally, this was not that sort of occasion he was not a man
to waste time in preliminaries. Benyon had immediately the impression
of having seen him--or his equivalent--a thousand times before. He was
middle-aged, fresh-colored, whiskered, prosperous, indefinite. Georgina
introduced them to each other. She spoke of Benyon as an old friend whom
she had known long before she had known Mr. Roy, who had been very kind