. He saw the
steward standing near the fireplace, trembling, and watching him.

"I once did you a service," he said; "and you once told me you were not
an ungrateful man. Are you grateful enough to answer me if I ask you
something?"

He waited a little again. Mr. Bashwood still stood trembling at the
fireplace, silently watching him.

"I see you looking at me," he went on. "Is there some change in me that
I am not conscious of myself? Am I seeing things that you don't see? Am
I hearing words that you don't hear? Am I looking or speaking like a man
out of his senses?"

Again he waited, and again the silence was unbroken. His eyes began to
glitter; and the savage blood that he had inherited from his mother rose
dark and slow in his ashy cheeks.

"Is that woman," he asked, "the woman whom you once knew, whose name was
Miss Gwilt?"

Once more his wife collected her fatal courage. Once more his wife spoke
her fatal words.

"You compel me to repeat," she said, "that you are presuming on our
acquaintance, and that you are forgetting what is due to me."

He turned upon her, with a savage suddenness which forced a cry of alarm
from Mr. Bashwood's lips.

"Are you, or are you not, My Wife?" he asked, through his set teeth.

She raised her eyes to his for the first time. Her lost spirit looked at
him, steadily defiant, out of the hell of its own despair.

"I am _not_ your wife," she said.

He staggered back, with his hands groping for something to hold by, like
the hands of a man in the dark. He leaned heavily against the wall of
the room, and looked at the woman who had slept on his bosom, and who
had denied him to his face.

Mr. Bashwood stole panic-stricken to her side. "Go in there!" he
whispered, trying to draw her toward the folding-doors which led into
the next room. "For God's sake, be quick! He'll kill you!"

She put the old man back with her hand. She looked at him with a sudden
irradiation of her blank face. She answered him with lips that struggled
slowly into a frightful smile.

"_Let_ him kill me," she said.

As the words passed her lips, he sprang forward from the wall, with a
cry that rang through the house. The frenzy of a maddened man flashed at
her from his glassy eyes, and clutched at her in his threatening hands.
He came on till he was within arms-length of her--and suddenly stood
still. The black flush died out of his face in the instant when he
stopped. His eyelids fell, his outstretched