esirably luscious, turning to
ashes in his mouth.

Long he stood there, the silence between them entirely unbroken. Then at
length he stirred, turned from the parapet, and paced slowly back until
he came to stand beside the divan, looking down upon her from his great
height.

"At last you have heard the truth," he said. And as she made no answer
he continued: "I am thankful it was surprised out of him before the
torture was applied, else you might have concluded that pain was
wringing a false confession from him." He paused, but still she did
not speak; indeed, she made no sign that she had heard him. "That," he
concluded, "was the man whom you preferred to me. Faith, you did not
flatter me, as perhaps you may have learnt."

At last she was moved from her silence, and her voice came dull and
hard. "I have learnt how little there is to choose between you," she
said. "It was to have been expected. I might have known two brothers
could not have been so dissimilar in nature. Oh, I am learning a deal,
and swiftly!"

It was a speech that angered him, that cast out entirely the softer mood
that had been growing in him.

"You are learning?" he echoed. "What are you learning?"

"Knowledge of the ways of men."

His teeth gleamed in his wry smile. "I hope the knowledge will bring you
as much bitterness as the knowledge of women--of one woman--has brought
me. To have believed me what you believed me--me whom you conceived
yourself to love!" He felt, perhaps the need to repeat it that he might
keep the grounds of his grievance well before his mind.

"If I have a mercy to beg of you it is that you will not shame me with
the reminder."

"Of your faithlessness?" he asked. "Of your disloyal readiness to
believe the worst evil of me?"

"Of my ever having believed that I loved you. That is the thought that
shames me, as nothing else in life could shame me, as not even the
slave-market and all the insult to which you have submitted me could
shame me. You taunt me with my readiness to believe evil of you...."

"I do more than taunt you with it," he broke in, his anger mounting
under the pitiless lash of her scorn. "I lay to your charge the wasted
years of my life, all the evil that has followed out of it, all that I
have suffered, all that I have lost, all that I am become."

She looked up at him coldly, astonishingly mistress of herself. "You lay
all this to my charge?" she asked him.

"I do." He was very vehement. "Had yo