ng-room floor.

"Any name, sir?"

"No name."

Mr. Bashwood had barely completed his report of what had happened at the
terminus; Mr. Bashwood's imperious mistress was still sitting speechless
under the shock of the discovery that had burst on her--when the door
of the room opened; and, without a word of warning to proceed him,
Midwinter appeared on the threshold. He took one step into the room, and
mechanically pushed the door to behind him. He stood in dead silence,
and confronted his wife, with a scrutiny that was terrible in its
unnatural self-possession, and that enveloped her steadily in one
comprehensive look from head to foot.

In dead silence on her side, she rose from her chair. In dead silence
she stood erect on the hearth-rug, and faced her husband in widow's
weeds.

He took one step nearer to her, and stopped again. He lifted his
hand, and pointed with his lean brown finger at her dress.

"What does that mean?" he asked, without losing his terrible
self-possession, and without moving his outstretched hand.

At the sound of his voice, the quick rise and fall of her bosom--which
had been the one outward betrayal thus far of the inner agony that
tortured her--suddenly stopped. She stood impenetrably silent,
breathlessly still--as if his question had struck her dead, and his
pointing hand had petrified her.

He advanced one step nearer, and reiterated his words in a voice even
lower and quieter than the voice in which he had spoken first.

One moment more of silence, one moment more of inaction, might have been
the salvation of her. But the fatal force of her character triumphed
at the crisis of her destiny, and his. White and still, and haggard and
old, she met the dreadful emergency with a dreadful courage, and spoke
the irrevocable words which renounced him to his face.

"Mr. Midwinter," she said, in tones unnaturally hard and unnaturally
clear, "our acquaintance hardly entitles you to speak to me in that
manner." Those were her words. She never lifted her eyes from the ground
while she spoke them. When she had done, the last faint vestige of color
in her cheeks faded out.

There was a pause. Still steadily looking at her, he set himself to
fix the language she had used to him in his mind. "She calls me
'Mr. Midwinter,'" he said, slowly, in a whisper. "She speaks of 'our
acquaintance.'" He waited a little and looked round the room. His
wandering eyes encountered Mr. Bashwood for the first time