She read them carefully. Whilst she was doing so, he sat down and
waited.

"These were written two years ago," said she in a sad voice, as she
folded them together, "a year after we were married."

It was the tone of her voice that did it--as she handed the letters back
to him, she saw that his eyes were filled with tears.

He put them back in the bureau without a word. He felt that he had
struck the innocent again and most cruelly.

Then he came back to the chair on which he had been sitting and stood
holding its back.

"You see how we are both placed," said he. "To prove your husband's
death, all my business would have to be raked up. I don't mind, because
I have acted straight, but you would mind. The fact of his suicide, the
fact of his sending me home--everything, that would hit you again and
again. Yet, look at your position--I do not know what we are to do. If I
go away and go back to the States, I leave you before the world as the
wife of a man still living who has deserted you, if I stay and go on
being the Earl of Rochester, you are tied to a phantom."

He paced the floor, head down, wrestling with an insoluble problem,
whilst she sat looking at him.

"Which is the easiest for you to do?" asked she.

"Oh, me," said he; "I'm not thinking of myself--back to the States, of
course, but that's out of the question--there are lots of easy things to
do, but when my case comes in contact with yours, there's nothing easy
to do. Do you think it was easy for me to go off that night and leave
you waiting for me, feeling that you thought me a skunk? No, that was
not easy."

She had been sitting very calm and still up till now, then suddenly she
looked down. She burst into tears.

"Oh," she cried, "why were you not him--if he had only been you. He
cared nothing for me, yet I loved him--you--you--"

"I care for nothing at all but you," said he.

She shuddered all over and turned her head away.

"That's the mischief of it as far as I am concerned," he went on. "I
can't escape without injuring you and so myself--yet I don't wonder at
your hating me."

She turned her face to him, it was flushed and wet.

"I do not hate you," said she; "you are the only man I ever
met--unselfish."

"No," he said, "I'm selfish. It's just because I love you that I think
of you more than myself, and I love you because you are good and sweet.
I could not do you wrong just because of that. If you were another
woman, I would no