long. It had done its work. Once more she put her hands
before her face. "Listen," she said. "I will tell you."

He did not stir nor move his eyes from her hidden face while she spoke.
Swiftly, clearly, monotonously, she told him all. She paused at nothing;
she slurred nothing. She read him the story of the stupid sinner from
the long closed book of the past. There was no hesitation for a word; no
uncertainty for an interpretation. Everything was written clearly and
she had only to read it out. And while she spoke, of her girlhood, her
marriage, of the man with the unknown name--his father--of her flight
with him, her flight from him, here, to this house, Augustine sat
motionless. His eyes considered her, fixed in their contemplation.

She told him of his own coming, of her brother's anger and dismay, of
Sir Hugh's magnanimity, and of how he had been born to her, her child,
the unfortunate one, whom she had felt unworthy to love as a child
should be loved. She told him how her sin had shut him away and made
strangeness grow between them.

And when all this was told Amabel put down her hands. His stillness had
grown uncanny: he might not have been there; she might have been talking
in an empty room. But he was there, sitting opposite her, as she had
last seen him, half turned in his seat, fallen together a little as
though his breathing were very slight and shallow; and his dilated eyes,
strange, deep, fierce, were fixed on her. She shut the sight out with
her hands.

She stumbled a little now in speaking on, and spoke more slowly. She
knew herself condemned and the rest seemed unnecessary. It only remained
to tell him how her mistaken love had also shut him out; to tell,
slightly, not touching Lady Elliston's name, of how the mistake had come
to pass; to say, finally, on long, failing breaths, that her sin had
always been between them but that, until the other day, when he had told
her of his ideals, she had not seen how impassable was the division.
"And now," she said, and the convulsive trembling shook her as she
spoke, "now you must say what you will do. I am a different woman from
the mother you have loved and reverenced. You will not care to be with
the stranger you must feel me to be. You are free, and you must leave
me. Only," she said, but her voice now shook so that she could hardly
say the words--"only--I will always be here--loving you, Augustine;
loving you and perhaps,--forgive me if I have no right to t