ing, once for all. First I want you to
answer a question or two, straightly, without prevarication. You went
out early, it seems. Where?"

"To Mrs Riley's----"

"And after?"

"I met Mr Kresney--quite by chance. He wanted me to come in to tea. He
said Miss Kresney would soon be home--and I--I----"

"No need for polite fabrications;" he took her up quickly. "You went
in. Miss Kresney did _not_ come home. Is this the first time he has
trapped you with a convenient lie? Tell me that."

Words and tone roused her to a passing flash of retaliation.

"If you're going to get so angry, Theo, I won't tell you _any_thing,
and I _won't_ be questioned like a creature in a witness-box! Some
one's been saying horrid things of me. Major Wyndham, I suppose. You
wouldn't listen to any one else. It's very mean of him----"

Desmond took a hasty step forward. "How dare you speak so of the
straightest man living!" he cried with imperious heat. "You, who have
taken advantage of my blindness to deceive me deliberately a second
time, on account of a cad who isn't fit to tie your shoe-strings. I've
been blind in more than one way lately. But that is over now. I am not
likely to repeat the mistake of trusting you implicitly--after this."

She cowered under the lash of his just wrath, hiding her face and
crying heart-broken tears--the bitterest she had yet shed. In
snatching at the shadow it seemed she had lost the substance past
recall.

"Oh! You are cruel--horrible!" she wailed, with her disarming,
pathetic air of a scolded child that made a rough word to her seem
cowardly as a blow.

"No need to break your heart over it," he said more gently; "and as
to cruelty, Evelyn, haven't you abused my faith in your loyalty and
dragged my pride in the dust by letting your name be coupled with that
man's, though I told you plainly I had good reasons for distrusting
and disliking him. I suppose he made a dead set at you while I was
away--cowardly brute! But what hits me hardest of all is not your
indiscretion; it's your persistent crookedness that poisons
everything. It was the same over your bills last year--as I told you
then. It's the same now. It's a poor look-out if a man can't trust his
own wife; but I suppose you must have lied to me--and to Honor, a
dozen times this last week."

It had cost him an effort to speak so plainly and at such length; but
his wife's uneven breathing was the only answer he received.

He came closer and laid an