ty codes. Nature and feeling are enough for me. I saw you wanting
sympathy and affection----'

'My wife!' cried Robert, hearing nothing but that one word. And then,
his glance sweeping over the woman before him, he made a stern step
forward.

'Let me go, Madame de Netteville, let me go, or I shall forget that you
are a woman and I a man, and that in some way I cannot understand my own
blindness and folly----'

'Must have led to this most undesirable scene,' she said with mocking
suddenness, throwing herself, however, effectually in his way. Then a
change came over her, and erect, ghastly white, with frowning brow and
shaking limbs, a baffled and smarting woman from whom every restraint
had fallen away, let loose upon him a torrent of gall and bitterness
which he could not have cut short without actual violence.

He stood proudly enduring it, waiting for the moment when what seemed to
him an outbreak of mania should have spent itself. But suddenly he
caught Catherine's name coupled with some contemptuous epithet or other,
and his self-control failed him. With flashing eyes he went close up to
her and took her wrists in a grip of iron.

'You shall not,' he said, beside himself, 'you shall not! What have I
done--what has she done--that you should allow yourself such words? My
poor wife!'

A passionate flood of self-reproachful love was on his lips. He choked
it back. It was desecration that _her_ name should be mentioned in that
room. But he dropped the hand he held. The fierceness died out of his
eyes. His companion stood beside him panting, breathless, afraid.

'Thank God,' he said slowly, 'thank God for yourself and me that I
_love_ my wife! I am not worthy of her--doubly unworthy, since it has
been possible for any human being to suspect for one instant that I was
ungrateful for the blessing of her love, that I could ever forget and
dishonour her! But worthy or not---- No!--no matter! Madame de
Netteville, let me go, and forget that such a person exists.'

She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern manliness of the
face which seemed in this half-hour to have grown older, at the attitude
with its mingled dignity and appeal. In that second she realised what
she had done and what she had forfeited; she measured the gulf between
herself and the man before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding
him, as it were, with menacing defiant eyes, she moved aside, she waved
her hand with a contemptuous gestur