never had an
opportunity."

"Forgive me for correcting you," she said, gently but very firmly. "But
it is not the tragedy of a child. It's the tragedy of a man. I am going
to talk very frankly to you. I make no apology for doing so. I am what
is called"--she smiled faintly--"a woman of the world, and you, I
think, are an unworldly man. Because I am of the world, and you, in
spirit"--she looked at him almost deprecatingly--"are not of it, I can
say what I have come here to try to say. I couldn't say it to a man of
the world, because I could never give a woman away to such a man. Tell
me though, first, if you don't mind--do you care for Mrs. Dion Leith?"

"Very much," said Father Robertson, simply and warmly.

"Do you care for her enough to tell her the truth?"

"I never wish to tell her anything else."

Suddenly Lady Ingleton's face flushed, her dark eyes flashed and then
filled with tears, and she said in a voice that shook with emotion:

"Dion Leith killed a body by accident, the body of his little boy. She
is murdering a soul deliberately, the soul of her husband."

She did not know at all why she was so suddenly and so violently moved.
She had not expected this abrupt access of feeling. It had rushed upon
her from she knew not where. She was startled by it.

"I don't know why I should care," she commented, as if half ashamed of
herself.

Then she added, with a touch of almost shy defiance:

"But I do care, I do care. That's why I've come here."

"You are right to care if it is so," said Father Robertson.

"Such lots of women wouldn't," she continued, in a quite different,
almost cynical, voice. "But that man is an exceptional man--not in
intellect, but in heart. And I'm a very happy woman. Perhaps you wonder
what that has to do with it. Well sometimes I see things through my
happiness, just because of it; sometimes I see unhappiness through it."

Her voice had changed again, had become much softer. She drew her chair
a little nearer to the fire.

"Do you ever receive confessions, Mr. Robertson--as a priest, I mean?"
she asked.

"Yes, very often."

"They are sacred, I know, even in your church."

"Yes," he said, without emphasis.

His lack of emphasis decided her. Till this moment she had been
undecided about a certain thing, although she herself perhaps was not
fully aware of her hesitation.

"I want to do a thing that I have never yet done," she said. "I want to
be treacherous to a friend, to