ords, Catherine pointed to the chair. "I am ready to hear you," she
resumed--"but I have something to ask first. Does what you wish to say
to me relate only to yourself?"

"It relates to another person, as well as to myself."

That reply, and the inference to which it led, tried Catherine's
resolution to preserve her self-control, as nothing had tried it yet.

"If that other person," she began, "means Mr. Herbert Linley--"

Sydney interrupted her, in words which she was entirely unprepared to
hear.

"I shall never see Mr. Herbert Linley again."

"Has he deserted you?"

"No. It is _I_ who have left _him._"

"You!"

The emphasis laid on that one word forced Sydney to assert herself for
the first time.

"If I had not left him of my own free will," she said, "what else would
excuse me for venturing to come here?"

Catherine's sense of justice felt the force of that reply. At the same
time her sense of injury set its own construction on Sydney's motive.
"Has his cruelty driven you away from him?" she asked.

"If he has been cruel to me," Sydney answered, "do you think I should
have come here to complain of it to You? Do me the justice to believe
that I am not capable of such self-degradation as that. I have nothing
to complain of."

"And yet you have left him?"

"He has been all that is kind and considerate: he has done everything
that a man in his unhappy position could do to set my mind at ease. And
yet I have left him. Oh, I claim no merit for my repentance, bitterly
as I feel it! I might not have had the courage to leave him--if he had
loved me as he once loved you."

"Miss Westerfield, you are the last person living who ought to allude to
my married life."

"You may perhaps pardon the allusion, madam, when you have heard what
I have still to say. I owe it to Mr. Herbert Linley, if not to you, to
confess that his life with me has _not_ been a life of happiness. He has
tried, compassionately tried, to keep his secret sorrow from discovery,
and he has failed. I had long suspected the truth; but I only saw it in
his face when he found the book you left behind you at the hotel. Your
image has, from first to last, been the one living image in his guilty
heart. I am the miserable victim of a man's passing fancy. You have
been, you are still, the one object of a husband's love. Ask your own
heart if the woman lives who can say to you what I have said--unless she
knew it to be true."

Catherine's head sank