t. "You will not, I believe, seek to
enforce your title to dispute them with me?"

He gave a gesture of denial.

He, the wrong-doer, could not realise the gulf which his betrayal had
opened betwixt himself and her. On him all the ties of their past
passion were sweet, precious, unchanged in their dominion. He could not
realise that to her all these memories were abhorred, poisoned, stamped
with ineffable shame; he could not believe that she, who had loved the
dust that his feet had brushed, could now regard him as one leprous and
accursed. He was slow to understand that his sin had driven him out of
her life for evermore.

Commonly it is the woman on whom the remembrance of love has an
enthralling power when love itself is traitor; commonly it is the man on
whom the past has little influence, and to whom its appeal is vainly
made; but here the position was reversed. He would have pleaded by it;
she refused to acknowledge it, and remained as adamant before it. His
nerve was too broken, his conscience was too heavily weighted, for him
to attempt to rebel against her decisions or sway her judgment. If she
had bidden him go out and slay himself he would gladly have obeyed.

"Once you said," he murmured timidly, "that repentance washes out all
crimes. Will you count my remorse as nothing?"

"You would have known no remorse had your secret never been discovered!"

He shrank as from a blow.

"That is not true," he said wearily. "But how can I hope you will
believe me?"

She answered nothing.

"Once you told me that there was no sin you would not pardon me!" he
muttered.

She replied:

"We pardon sin; we do not pardon baseness."

She paused and put her hand to her heart; then she spoke again in that
cold, forced, measured voice, which seemed on his ear as hard and
pitiless as the strokes of an iron hammer, beating life out beneath it.

"You will leave Hohenszalras; you will go where you will; you have the
revenues of Idrac. Any other financial arrangements that you may wish to
make I will direct my lawyers to carry out. If the revenues of Idrac be
insufficient to maintain you"----

"Do not insult me--so," he murmured, with a suffocated sound in his
voice, as though some hand were clutching at his throat.

"Insult _you_!" she echoed with a terrible scorn.

She resumed with the same inflexible calmness,

"You must live as becomes the rank due to my husband. The world need
suspect nothing. There is no obligat