m, her hands clenched. Drake
dropped his eyes from her face, raised them again, and again lowered
them. 'Is it?' she repeated, and her voice rose to the tone of a demand.

'Yes,' and he answered her in a whisper.

Clarice recoiled from him with a cry of disgust. She noticed that he drew
a long breath--of relief, it seemed--like the criminal when his crime is
at last brought home to him. 'Then all that story,' she began, 'you told
me at Beaufort Gardens about--about Boruwimi was just meant to deceive
me. You talked about duty! Duty compelled you! You would have hanged
Gorley just the same had you known that he had been engaged to me.' She
began to laugh hysterically. 'It was all duty,--duty from beginning to
end, and I believed you. Heaven help me, I came to honour you for it. And
in reality it was a lie!' She lashed the words at him, but he stood
patiently, and made no rejoinder. 'I always wondered why you told me the
story,' she continued. 'You felt that I had a right to know, I remember.
And you felt bound to tell me. It's clear enough now why you felt bound.
You had found out, I suppose, that my husband knew--' She stopped
suddenly, as though some new thought had flashed into her mind. 'And I
came here to give up everything--just for your sake. Oh, suppose that I
hadn't found you out!'

She stooped and picked up from the floor the torn pages of the _Meteor_.
She folded them carefully and then moved towards the door. Drake opened
it and stood aside.

Clarice went out, called a hansom and drove home. When she arrived there
she ordered tea to be brought to the drawing-room and sat down and again
read the article in the _Meteor_. When the tea was brought, she ordered
it to be taken into Sidney's study. She walked restlessly about that
room, as though she was trying to habituate herself to it. A green shade
lay upon the writing-table, which her husband was accustomed to wear over
his eyes. She took it up, looked at it for a little, and then threw it
down again with an air of weariness and distaste. A few minutes later
Percy Conway called and was admitted.

CHAPTER XVII

Fielding opened his newspaper the next morning with unusual eagerness,
and, turning to the Parliamentary reports, glanced down column after
column in search of Drake's speech. The absence of it threw him into some
consternation. He tossed the newspaper on to the breakfast-table and rose
from his seat. As he moved, however, he caught sight of