ria's voice had grown calmer.

"I came to make an appeal to your sense of duty and your generosity."

"Ah!"

"I came," Henriette went on, bracing herself as if for a great effort,
"to remind you that when you married, you entered into a contract which
you now repudiate."

Hadria started up, reddening with anger.

"I did no such thing, and you know it, Henriette. How do you _dare_ to
sit there and tell me that?"

"I tell you nothing but the truth. Every woman who marries enters, by
that fact, into a contract."

Miss Temperley had evidently regarded this as a strong card and played
it hopefully.

Hadria was trembling with anger. She steadied her voice. "Then you
actually intended to _entrap_ me into this so-called contract, by
leading me to suppose that it would mean nothing more between Hubert and
myself than an unavoidable formality! You tell me this to my face, and
don't appear to see that you are confessing an act of deliberate
treachery."

"Nonsense," cried Henriette. "There was nothing that any sane person
would have objected to, in our conduct."

Hadria stood looking down scornfully on her sister-in-law. She shrugged
her shoulders, as if in bewilderment.

"And yet you would have felt yourselves stained with dishonour for the
rest of your lives had you procured anything _else_ on false pretences!
But a woman--that is a different affair. The code of honour does not
here apply, it would seem. _Any_ fraud may be honourably practised on
_her_, and wild is the surprise and indignation if she objects when she
finds it out."

"You are perfectly mad," cried Henriette, tapping angrily with her
fingers on the arm of her chair.

"What I say is true, whether I be mad or sane. What you call the
'contract' is simply a cunning contrivance for making a woman and her
possible children the legal property of a man, and for enlisting her own
honour and conscience to safeguard the disgraceful transaction."

"Ah," said Henriette, on the watch for her opportunity, "then you admit
that her honour and conscience _are_ enlisted?"

"Certainly, in the case of most women. That enlistment is a masterpiece
of policy. To make a prisoner his own warder is surely no light stroke
of genius. But that is exactly what I refused to be from the first, and
no one could have spoken more plainly. And now you are shocked and
pained and aggrieved because I won't eat my words. Yet we have talked
over all this, in my room at Dunaghee, by the