ce of pure and faultless beauty; when another took
it from him, he had endured; now the other spoilt and stained and defiled
it; could he still endure? It seems sometimes as though the deep silence
of night carries thoughts from heart to heart that would be lost in the
passage through the broken tumultuous sea of day. The thought that was in
him he felt to be in her also, changed as her mind would change it, yet
in essence the same. She had now no ironical smiles for him, no fencing,
and no playing with her fate; and he had for her no talk of loyalty. The
time for these was gone in the light of the confidence that her silence
gave him; it told him everything, and he had no rebuke for its openness.
At last he put out his hand and lightly pressed hers for a moment. She
turned her eyes on him.

"It's a little hard, isn't it?" she asked. "I can stand most things, but
it's hard to have to tell lies to your friends." Her voice rose a little
and shook as the composure which she had so long kept failed her. "And
they know I'm lying. Oh, I don't deceive them, however hard I try. They
don't tell me so, but they know. I can't help it, I must do it. I must
sit and do it, knowing that they know it's a lie. For decency's sake I
must do it, though. Some people believe, the Mildmays believe; but you
here don't. You know me too well, and you know him too well."

"For God's sake, don't talk like that," said Marchmont.

"Don't talk like that! The talk's not the harm. If you could tell me how
not to live like that!" Her self-control broke utterly; she covered her
face with her hands and sobbed.

"For God's sake!" he murmured again.

"Oh, you don't know. This is only the crown of it. It goes on every day.
I'm coming not to know myself, not to be myself. I live scheming and
lying. I've given everything, all my life. Must I give myself, my own
self, too? Must I lose that for him?"

Her bitter despairing words seemed to him what at that moment her mood
made them seem to herself, the all-sufficient all-embracing summary of
her life; she had then no thought of another side to it, and into that
she gave him no insight. He counted as dead for her all the high hopes
and the attractive imaginings with which Quisante once had fired her.
Dead for her they were at that moment; she could see nothing but her
husband's baseness and a baseness bred by it in herself; her bond to him
was an obligation to dishonour and a chain of treachery. She abandoned