assion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for her.
And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I
regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will
read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she
did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one
is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one,
defenceless as a rabbit.

'You are very kind to me,' she said, putting her cup on the mantelpiece
with a nervous rattle; 'and I need it.'

'Tell me,' I murmured. 'Tell me--what I can do.'

I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace. A distance between us
seemed necessary.

'You can't do anything, my dear,' she said. 'Only I was obliged to talk
to someone, after all the night. It's about Frank.'

'Mr. Ispenlove!' I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not
very well.

'Yes. He has left me.'

'But why? What is the matter?'

Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates
me. But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation. Still, could I
have behaved differently?

'You won't understand unless I begin a long time ago,' said Mary
Ispenlove. 'Carlotta, my married life has been awful--awful--a tragedy.
It has been a tragedy both for him and for me. But no one has suspected
it; we have hidden it.'

I nodded. I, however, had suspected it.

'It's just twenty years--yes, twenty--since I fell in love,' she
proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.

'With--Frank,' I assumed. I lay back in bed.

'No,' she said. 'With another man. That was in Brixton, when I was a
girl living with my father; my mother was dead. He was a barrister--I
mean the man I was in love with. He had only just been called to the Bar.
I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him. Certainly he
did; he could not help seeing it. I could not conceal it. Of course I can
understand now that it flattered him. Naturally it did. Any man is
flattered when a woman falls in love with him. And my father was rich,
and so on, and so on. We saw each other a lot. I hoped, and I kept on
hoping. Some people even said it was a match, and that I was throwing
myself away. Fancy--throwing myself away--me!--who have never been good
for anything! My father did not care much for the man; said he was
selfish and grasping. Possibly he was; but I was in love with him all the
same. Then I met Frank, and Fra