an excessive calmness. Her
hands were trembling; she folded them again upon her lap. Every line of
her face, every muscle of her body, declared the constraint in which
she held herself. This, said Hugh inwardly, was no more than he had
expected; disaster made noble proof of Sibyl's strength.

'I'll tell you from the beginning.'

He recounted faithfully the incidents at Waterloo Station, and the
beginning of Mrs. Maskell's narrative in the cab. At the disclosure of
her relations with Redgrave, he was interrupted by a short, hard laugh.

'I couldn't help it, Hugh. That woman!--why, you have always said you
were sure to meet her somewhere. Housekeeper at Mr. Redgrave's! We know
what the end of that would be!'

Sibyl talked rapidly, in an excited chatter--the kind of utterance
never heard upon her lips.

'It was strange,' Hugh continued. 'Seems to have been mere chance. Then
she began to say that she had learnt some of Redgrave's secrets--about
people who came and went mysteriously. And then--Sibyl, I can't speak
the words. It was the foulest slander that she could have invented. She
meant to drive me mad, and she succeeded--curse her!'

Drops of anguish stood upon his forehead. He sprang up and crossed the
room. Turning again, he saw his wife gazing at him, as if in utmost
perplexity.

'Hugh, I don't in the least understand you. What _was_ the slander?
Perhaps I am stupid--but----'

He came near, but could not look her in the eyes.

'My dearest'--his voice shook--'it was an infamous lie about
_you_--that _you_ had been there----'

'Why, of course I have! You know that I have.'

'She meant more than that. She said you had been there secretly--at
night----'

Hugh Carnaby--the man who had lived as high-blooded men do live, who
had laughed by the camp-fire or in the club smoking-room at many a
Rabelaisian story and capped it with another, who hated mock modesty,
was all for honest openness between man and woman--stood in guilty
embarrassment before his own wife's face of innocence. It would have
been a sheer impossibility for him to ask her where and how she spent a
certain evening last winter; Sibyl, now as ever, was his ideal of
chaste womanhood. He scorned himself for what he had yet to tell.

Sibyl was gazing at him, steadily, inquiringly.

'She made you believe this?' fell upon the silence, in her softest,
clearest tones.

'No! She couldn't make me _believe_ it. But the artful devil had such a
way of t