"No!" she said, at last. "I never did mean to tell you, while I was
writing it. You know I don't tell lies, William! The real fact is, I was
afraid you'd stop it."

"Good God!" He threw up his hands with a sound of amazement, then thrust
them again into his pockets and began to pace up and down.

"But then"--she resumed--"I thought you'd soon get over it, and that it
was funny--and everybody would laugh--and you'd laugh--and there would
be an end of it."

He turned and stared at her. "Frankly, Kitty--I don't understand what
you can be made of! You imagined that that sketch of Lord Parham"--he
struck the open page--"a sketch written by <i>my wife</i>, describing my
official chief--when he was my guest--under my own roof--with all sorts
of details of the most intimate and offensive kind--mocking his
speech--his manners--his little personal ways--charging him with being
the corrupt tool of Lady Parham, disloyal to his colleagues, a man not
to be trusted--and justifying all this by a sort of evidence that you
could only have got as my wife and Lord Parham's hostess--you actually
supposed that you could write and publish <i>that!</i>--without in the first
place its being plain to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that you had written
it--and in the next, without making it impossible for your husband to
remain a colleague of the man you had treated in such a way? Kitty!--you
are not a stupid woman! Do you really mean to say that you could write
and publish this book without <i>knowing</i> that you were doing a wrong
action--which, so far from serving me, could only damage my career
irreparably? Did nothing--did no one warn you--if you were determined to
keep such a secret from your husband, whom it most concerned?"

He had come to stand beside her, both hands on the back of a
chair--stooping forward to emphasize his words--the lines of his fine
face and noble brow contracted by anger and pain.

"Mr. Darrell warned me," said Kitty, in a low voice, as though those
imperious eyes compelled the truth from her--"but of course I didn't
believe him."

"Darrell!" cried Ashe, in amazement--"Darrell! You confided in him?"

"I told him all about it. It was he who took it to a publisher."

"Hound!" said Ashe, between his teeth. "So that was his revenge."

"Oh, you needn't blame him too much," said Kitty, proudly, not
understanding the remark. "He wrote to me not long ago to say it was
horribly unwise--and that he washed his hands of