owed.

"Whatever you tell me I shall be proud to hear--and keep to myself," he
said.

"Thanks." Her manner had lost its slight animation and was once more
weary, indifferent. "Well, first of all, have you ever seen me before?"

"No. Though I confess that something in your face seemed familiar to me
last night."

"Oh." She did not seem much impressed. "Well, to put it differently,
have you ever heard of me?"

"No," said Anstice. "To the best of my belief I have never heard your
name before."

"I see. Well, I will tell you who I am, and what I am supposed to have
done." No further warmth enlivened her manner, which throughout was
cold, almost, one would have said, absent. "When I was eighteen I
married Major Carstairs, a soldier a good many years older than myself.
Presently I went out to India with him, and lived there for four years,
coming home when our child was three years old."

She paused.

"I came here--this was my husband's old home--and settled down with
Cherry. And when I had been in the parish a year or so, there was a
scandal in Littlefield."

She stopped, and her mouth quivered into a faint smile.

"Oh, I was not the chief character--at first! It was a case in which the
Vicar's wife won an unenviable notoriety. It seemed there had been a
secret in her life, years before when she was a pretty, silly girl,
which was known to very few besides her husband and, I presume, her own
people. Now you would not think I was a sympathetic person--one in whom
a sentimental, rather neurotic woman would confide. Would you?"

And looking at her, with her air of cold indifference, of complete
detachment from the world around her, Anstice agreed that he would not
expect her to be the confidante of such a woman.

"Yet within a month of our meeting Laura Ogden had confided her secret
to me--and a silly, futile story it was." Her pale face looked disdain
at the remembrance. "No harm, of course, was done. I kept her secret and
advised her not to repeat what she had told me to anyone else in
Littlefield."

"She followed your advice?" Anstice had no idea what was coming, but an
interest to which he had long been a stranger was waking slowly in his
heart.

"_Chi lo so?_" She shrugged her shoulders. "Afterwards she swore she had
told no one but me. You see it appeared she very soon regretted having
given me her confidence. It happened that shortly after she had told me
her story we had--not a quarrel, because to tel