of majesty that
she had been to the world. With that amazement of his went something
like terror of her dark beauty, which excitement kindled into an
appearance scarcely mortal in his eyes. Incongruously there rushed into
his mind, occupied as it was with the affair of the moment, a little
knot of ideas... she was unique not because of her beauty but because
of its being united with intensity of nature; in England all the very
beautiful women were placid, all the fiery women seemed to have burnt up
the best of their beauty; that was why no beautiful woman had ever cast
this sort of spell on him before; when it was a question of wit in
women he had preferred the brighter flame to the duller, without much
regarding the lamp. 'All this is very disputable,' said his reason; and
instinct answered, 'Yes, except that I am under a spell'; and a deeper
instinct cried out, 'Away with it!' He forced his mind back to her
story, and found growing swiftly in him an irrepressible conviction. It
was all very fine; but it would not do.

'I feel as if I had led you into saying more than you meant to say,
or than I wanted to learn,' he said slowly. 'But there is one brutal
question which is the whole point of my enquiry.' He braced his frame
like one preparing for a plunge into cold waters. 'Mrs Manderson, will
you assure me that your husband's change toward you had nothing to do
with John Marlowe?'

And what he had dreaded came. 'Oh!' she cried with a sound of anguish,
her face thrown up and open hands stretched out as if for pity; and then
the hands covered the burning face, and she flung herself aside among
the cushions at her elbow, so that he saw nothing but her heavy crown of
black hair, and her body moving with sobs that stabbed his heart, and a
foot turned inward gracelessly in an abandonment of misery. Like a
tall tower suddenly breaking apart she had fallen in ruins, helplessly
weeping.

Trent stood up, his face white and calm. With a senseless particularity
he placed his envelope exactly in the centre of the little polished
table. He walked to the door, closed it noiselessly as he went out, and
in a few minutes was tramping through the rain out of sight of White
Gables, going nowhere, seeing nothing, his soul shaken in the fierce
effort to kill and trample the raving impulse that had seized him in the
presence of her shame, that clamoured to him to drag himself before her
feet, to pray for pardon, to pour out words--he knew