oice, Anne turned toward him. A change of
expression appeared in her face, as she slowly advanced from the back
of the summer-house, which revealed a likeness to her moth er, not
perceivable at other times. As the mother had looked, in by-gone days,
at the man who had disowned her, so the daughter looked at Geoffrey
Delamayn--with the same terrible composure, and the same terrible
contempt.

"Well?" he asked. "What have you got to say to me?"

"Mr. Delamayn," she answered, "you are one of the fortunate people of
this world. You are a nobleman's son. You are a handsome man. You are
popular at your college. You are free of the best houses in England.
Are you something besides all this? Are you a coward and a scoundrel as
well?"

He started--opened his lips to speak--checked himself--and made an
uneasy attempt to laugh it off. "Come!" he said, "keep your temper."

The suppressed passion in her began to force its way to the surface.

"Keep my temper?" she repeated. "Do _you_ of all men expect me to
control myself? What a memory yours must be! Have you forgotten the time
when I was fool enough to think you were fond of me? and mad enough to
believe you could keep a promise?"

He persisted in trying to laugh it off. "Mad is a strongish word to use,
Miss Silvester!"

"Mad is the right word! I look back at my own infatuation--and I can't
account for it; I can't understand myself. What was there in _you_,"
she asked, with an outbreak of contemptuous surprise, "to attract such a
woman as I am?"

His inexhaustible good-nature was proof even against this. He put his
hands in his pockets, and said, "I'm sure I don't know."

She turned away from him. The frank brutality of the answer had not
offended her. It forced her, cruelly forced her, to remember that she
had nobody but herself to blame for the position in which she stood at
that moment. She was unwilling to let him see how the remembrance
hurt her--that was all. A sad, sad story; but it must be told. In her
mother's time she had been the sweetest, the most lovable of children.
In later days, under the care of her mother's friend, her girlhood
had passed so harmlessly and so happily--it seemed as if the sleeping
passions might sleep forever! She had lived on to the prime of her
womanhood--and then, when the treasure of her life was at its richest,
in one fatal moment she had flung it away on the man in whose presence
she now stood.

Was she without excuse? No: n