ay, and at the hour,
when he wrote those lines at the back of your letter to him, you were
_Geoffrey Delamayn's wedded wife!_"

He stopped, and looked at her again.

Without a word in reply, without the slightest movement in her from head
to foot, she looked back at him. The blank stillness of horror was in
her face. The deadly cold of horror was in her hands.

In silence, on his side, Sir Patrick drew back a step, with a faint
reflection of _her_ dismay in his face. Married--to the villain who had
not hesitated to calumniate the woman whom he had ruined, and then to
cast her helpless on the world. Married--to the traitor who had not
shrunk from betraying Arnold's trust in him, and desolating Arnold's
home. Married--to the ruffian who would have struck her that morning, if
the hands of his own friends had not held him back. And Sir Patrick had
never thought of it! Absorbed in the one idea of Blanche's future, he
had never thought of it, till that horror-stricken face looked at him,
and said, Think of _my_ future, too!

He came back to her. He took her cold hand once more in his.

"Forgive me," he said, "for thinking first of Blanche."

Blanche's name seemed to rouse her. The life came back to her face; the
tender brightness began to shine again in her eyes. He saw that he might
venture to speak more plainly still: he went on.

"I see the dreadful sacrifice as _you_ see it. I ask myself, have I any
right, has Blanche any right--"

She stopped him by a faint pressure of his hand.

"Yes," she said, softly, "if Blanche's happiness depends on it."

THIRTEENTH SCENE.--FULHAM.

CHAPTER THE FORTY-FIFTH.

THE FOOT-RACE.

A SOLITARY foreigner, drifting about London, drifted toward Fulham on
the day of the Foot-Race.

Little by little, he found himself involved in the current of a throng
of impetuous English people, all flowing together toward one given
point, and all decorated alike with colors of two prevailing hues--pink
and yellow. He drifted along with the stream of passengers on the
pavement (accompanied by a stream of carriages in the road) until they
stopped with one accord at a gate--and paid admission money to a man in
office--and poured into a great open space of ground which looked like
an uncultivated garden.

Arrived here, the foreign visitor opened his eyes in wonder at the scene
revealed to view. He observed thousands of people assembled, composed
almost exclusively of the middle and up