and _you_ damned out of everything! A
man partly forgiven! A man who went wrong for a woman! _No!_"

She sprang lightly to her feet and stood over me as I knelt before her.
"And I came here to be made love to, Stephen! I came here to be loved!
And you talk that nonsense! You remind me of everything--wretched!"

She lifted up her hands and then struck down with them, a gesture of
infinite impatience. Her face as she bent to me was alive with a
friendly anger, her eyes suddenly dark. "You _duffer_!" she repeated....

Sec. 10

Discovery followed hard upon that meeting. I had come over to Martens
with some book as a pretext; the man had told me that Lady Mary awaited
me in her blue parlor, and I went unannounced through the long gallery
to find her. The door stood a little ajar, I opened it softly so that
she did not hear me, and saw her seated at her writing-desk with her
back to me, and her cheek and eyebrow just touched by the sunlight from
the open terrace window. She was writing a note. I put my hand about her
shoulder, and bent to kiss her as she turned. Then as she came round to
me she started, was for a moment rigid, then thrust me from her and rose
very slowly to her feet.

I turned to the window and became as rigid, facing Justin. He was
standing on the terrace, staring at us, with a face that looked stupid
and inexpressive and--very white. The sky behind him, appropriately
enough, was full of the tattered inky onset of a thunderstorm. So we
remained for a lengthy second perhaps, a trite _tableau vivant_. We two
seemed to hang helplessly upon Justin, and he was the first of us to
move.

He made a queer, incomplete gesture with one hand, as if he wanted to
undo the top button of his waistcoat and then thought better of it. He
came very slowly into the room. When he spoke his voice had neither rage
nor denunciation in it. It was simply conversational. "I felt this was
going on," he said. And then to his wife with the note of one who
remarks dispassionately on a peculiar situation. "Yet somehow it seemed
wrong and unnatural to think such a thing of you."

His face took on something of the vexed look of a child who struggles
with a difficult task. "Do you mind," he said to me, "will you go?"

I took a moment for my reply. "No," I said. "Since you know at last----
There are things to be said."

"No," said Mary, suddenly. "Go! Let me talk to him."

"No," I said, "my place is here beside you."

He seemed n