urprised. There was a
lack of tone in it. It sounded, indeed, almost dry.

"Yes. Did you ever hear of Lady Ingleton?"

After an instant of consideration Rosamund said:

"Yes. I believe I met her somewhere once. Isn't she married to an
ambassador?"

"To our Ambassador at Constantinople."

"I think I sang once at some house where she was, in the days when I
used to sing."

"She has heard you sing."

"That was it then. But what can she want with me?"

"Your husband is in Constantinople. She knows him there."

Rosamund flushed to the roots of her yellow hair. When he saw that
painful wave of red go over her face Father Robertson looked away. All
the delicacy in him felt the agony of her outraged reserve. Her body had
stiffened.

"I must speak about this," he said. "Forgive me if you can. But even if
you cannot, I must speak."

She looked down. Her face was still burning.

"You have let me know a great deal about yourself," he went on. "That
fact doesn't give me any right to be curious. On the contrary! But I
think, perhaps, your confidence has given me a right to try to help you
spiritually even at the cost of giving you great mental pain. For a long
time I have felt that perhaps in my relation to you I have been morally
a coward."

Rosamund looked up.

"You could never be a coward," she said.

"You don't know that. Nobody knows that, perhaps, except myself. However
that may be, I must not play the coward now. Lady Ingleton met your
husband in Turkey. She brings very painful news of him."

Rosamund clasped her hands together and let them lie on her knees. She
was looking steadily at Father Robertson.

"His--his misery has made such an impression upon her that she felt
obliged to come here. She sent for me. But her real object in coming was
to see you, if possible. Will you see her?"

"No, no; I can't do that. I don't know her."

"I think I ought to tell you what she said. She asked me if you had ever
understood how much your husband loves you. Her exact words were, 'Does
his wife know how he loves her? Can she know it? Can she ever have known
it?'"

All the red had died away from Rosamund's face. She had become very
pale. Her eyes were steady. She sat without moving, and seemed to be
listening with fixed, even with strained, attention.

"And then she went on to tell me something which might seem to a great
many people to be quite contradictory of what she had just said--and she
said it with the