k out!"

"In the worst way that a woman can wrong those who love her. She has
sold herself to the Marchese Loredano."

The blood rushed to my head and face in a burning torrent. I could
scarcely see, and dared not trust myself to speak.

"I saw her going towards the cathedral," he went on, hurriedly. "It was
about three hours ago. I thought she might be going to confession, so I
hung back and followed her at a distance. When she got inside, however,
she went straight to the back of the pulpit, where this man was waiting
for her. You remember him--an old man who used to haunt the shop a month
or two back. Well, seeing how deep in conversation they were, and how
they stood close under the pulpit with their backs towards the church, I
fell into a passion of anger and went straight up the aisle, intending to
say or do something: I scarcely knew what; but, at all events, to draw
her arm through mine, and take her home. When I came within a few feet,
however, and found only a big pillar between myself and them, I paused.
They could not see me, nor I them; but I could hear their voices
distinctly, and--and I listened."

"Well, and you heard--"

"The terms of a shameful bargain--beauty on the one side, gold on the
other; so many thousand francs a year; a villa near Naples--Pah! it makes
me sick to repeat it."

And, with a shudder, he poured out another glass of wine and drank it at
a draught.

"After that," he said, presently, "I made no effort to bring her away.
The whole thing was so cold-blooded, so deliberate, so shameful, that I
felt I had only to wipe her out of my memory, and leave her to her fate.
I stole out of the cathedral, and walked about here by the sea for ever
so long, trying to get my thoughts straight. Then I remembered you, Ben;
and the recollection of how this wanton had come between us and broken up
our lives drove me wild. So I went up to the station and waited for you.
I felt you ought to know it all; and--and I thought, perhaps, that we
might go back to England together."

"The Marchese Loredano!"

It was all that I could say; all that I could think. As Mat had just
said of himself, I felt "like one stunned."

"There is one other thing I may as well tell you," he added, reluctantly,
"if only to show you how false a woman can be. We--we were to have been
married next month."

"_We_? Who? What do you mean?"

"I mean that we were to have been married--Gianetta and I."

A sudde