e particular
indiscretion so fashionable among the friends you have surrounded me
with. I merely mention this for your information, not because I am
particularly proud of it. It is not anything to be proud of, in my
case--it merely happened so; a matter, perhaps of personal taste,
perhaps because of lack of opportunity; and there is a remote
possibility that belated loyalty to a friend I once betrayed may have
kept me personally chaste in this rotting circus circle you have driven
me around in, harnessed to your vicious caprice, dragging the weight of
your corruption--"

She laughed. "I had no idea that I could be so eloquent, Jack. But my
mind has become curiously clear during the last year--strangely and
unusually limpid and precise. Why, my poor friend, every plot of yours
and of your friends--every underhand attempt to discredit and injure me
has been perfectly apparent to me. You supposed that my headaches, my
outbursts of anger, my wretched nights, passed in tears--and the long,
long days spent kneeling in the ashes of dead memories--all these you
supposed had weakened--perhaps unsettled--my mind. . . . You lie if you
deny it, for you have had doctors watching me for months. . . . You
didn't know I was aware of it, did you? But I was, and I am. . . . And
you told them that my father died of--of brain trouble, you coward!"

Still he stood there, jaw loose, gazing at her as though fascinated; and
she smiled and settled deeper in her chair, framing the gilded
foliations of the back with her beautiful arms.

"We might as well understand one another now," she said languidly. "If
you mean to get rid of me, there is no use in attempting to couple my
name with that of any man; first, because it is untrue, and you not only
know it, but you know you can't prove it. There remains the cowardly
method you have been nerving yourself to attempt, never dreaming that I
was aware of your purpose."

A soft, triumphant little laugh escaped her. There was something almost
childish in her delight at outwitting him, and, very slowly, into his
worn and faded eyes a new expression began to dawn--the flickering stare
of suspicion. And in it the purely personal impression of rage and
necessity of vengeance subsided; he eyed her intently, curiously, and
with a cool persistence which finally began to irritate her.

"What a credulous fool you are," she said, "to build your hopes of a
separation on any possible mental disability of mine."