She flushed a little as she answered: 

“Sir, I am.  I have been careful to bring the proof; here it is;” and she took from a little hand-bag a certified copy of the register of her marriage, and gave it to him.  He examined it carefully through his gold eye-glass, and handed it back.

“Perfectly in order.  Hum! some eight months since, I see.  May I ask why I am now for the first time favoured with a sight of this interesting document—­in short, why you come down, like an angel from the clouds, and reveal yourself at the present moment?”

“I have come,” she answered, “because of these.”  And she handed him two letters.  “I have come to ascertain if they are true; if my husband is a doubly perjured or a basely slandered man.”

He read the two anonymous letters.  With the contents of the first we are acquainted; the second merely told of the public announcement of Philip’s engagement.

“Speak,” she said, with desperate energy, the calm of her face breaking up like ice before a rush of waters.  “You must know everything; tell me my fate!”

“Girl, these villanous letters are in every particular true.  You have married in my son the biggest scoundrel in the county.  I can only say that I grieve for you.”

She listened in silence; then rising from her chair, said, with a gesture infinitely tragic in its simplicity: 

“Then it is finished; before God and man I renounce him.  Listen,” she went on, turning to her father-in-law, “I loved your son, he won my heart; but, though he said he loved me, I suspected him of playing fast and loose with me, on the one hand, and with my friend, Maria Lee, on the other.  So I determined to go away, and told him so.  Then it was that he offered to marry me at once, if I would change my purpose.  I loved him, and I consented—­yes, because I loved him so, I consented to even more.  I agreed to keep the marriage secret from you.  You see what it has led to.  I, a Von Holtzhausen, and the last of my name, stand here a byword and a scorn; my story will be found amusing at every dinner-table in the country-side, and my shame will even cling to my unborn child.  This is the return he has made me for my sacrifice of self-respect, and for consenting to marry him at all; to outrage my love and make me a public mockery.”

“We have been accustomed,” broke in the old squire, his pride somewhat nettled, “to consider our own a good family to marry into.  You do not seem to share that view.”

“Good; yes, there is plenty of your money for those who care for it; but, sir, as I told your son, it is not a family.  He did me no honour in marrying me, though I was nothing but a German companion, with no dower but her beauty.  I,”—­and here she flung her head back with an air of ineffable pride—­“did him the honour.  My ancestors, sir, were princes, when his were plough-boys.”

“Well, well,” answered the old man, testily, “ten generations of country gentry, and the Lord only knows how many more of stout yeomen before them, is a good enough descent for us; but I like your pride, and I am glad that you spring from an ancient race.  You have been shamefully treated, Hilda—­is not your name Hilda?—­but there are others, more free from blame than you are, who have been treated worse.”