oncerns my--my reputation."

"Fan me, ye winds!" he ejaculated.

"Those fine ladies and gentlemen of the town had made my name a
by-word," she explained in a low, tense voice, her eyelids lowered. "My
foolishness in running off with my Lord Rotherby--that I might at all
cost escape the tyranny of my Lady Ostermore" (Mr. Caryll's eyelids
flickered suddenly at that explanation)--"had made me a butt and a jest
and an object for slander. You remember, yourself, sir, the sneers and
oglings, the starings and simperings in the park that day when you made
your first attempt to champion my cause, inducing the Lady Mary Deller
to come and speak to me."

"Nay, nay--think of these things no more. Gnats will sting; 'tis in
their nature. I admit 'tis very vexing at the time; but it soon wears
off if the flesh they have stung be healthy. So think no more on't."

"But you do not know what follows. Her ladyship insisted that I should
drive with her a week after your hurt, when the doctor first proclaimed
you out of danger, and while the town was still all agog with the
affair. No doubt her ladyship thought to put a fresh and greater
humiliation upon me; you would not be present to blunt the edge of the
insult of those creatures' glances. She carried me to Vauxhall, where
a fuller scope might be given to the pursuit of my shame and
mortification. Instead, what think you happened?"

"Her ladyship, I trust, was disappointed."

"The word is too poor to describe her condition. She broke a fan, beat
her black boy and dismissed a footman, that she might vent some of the
spleen it moved in her. Never was such respect, never such homage shown
to any woman as was shown to me that evening. We were all but mobbed by
the very people who had earlier slighted me.

"'Twas all so mysterious that I must seek the explanation of it. And
I had it, at length, from his Grace of Wharton, who was at my side for
most of the time we walked in the gardens. I asked him frankly to what
was this change owing. And he told me, sir."

She looked at him as though no more need be said. But his brows were
knit. "He told you, ma'am?" he questioned. "He told you what?"

"What you had done at White's. How to all present and to my Lord
Rotherby's own face you had related the true story of what befell at
Maidstone--how I had gone thither, an innocent, foolish maid, to be
married to a villain, whom, like the silly child I was, I thought I
loved; how that villain, takin