“Please, let me finish.  I am, as you said, a little over-wrought!  Just hear me out and leave me to bear my troubles by myself.  You will make it easier for me”; she saw that the words hurt her lover.  But she did not modify them.  She was in the mood to hurt.  She had been betrayed by her need of sympathy into speaking words which she would gladly have recalled; she had been caught off her guard and almost unawares; and she resented it.  Chayne had told her that she looked ill and tired; and she resented that too.  No wonder she looked tired when she had her father with his secret treacheries on one side and an importunate lover upon the other!  She thought for a moment or two how best to put what she had still to stay: 

“I have probably said to you,” she resumed, “more than was right or fair—­I mean fair to my father.  I have no doubt exaggerated things.  I want you to forget what I have said.  For it led you into a mistake.”

Chayne looked at her in perplexity.

“A mistake?”

“Yes,” she answered.  She was standing in front of him with her forehead wrinkled and a somber, angry look in her eyes.  “A mistake which I must correct.  You said that I was living here without kindness.  It is not true.  My father is kind!” And as Chayne raised his eyes in a mute protest, she insisted on the word.  “Yes, kind and thoughtful—­thoughtful for others besides myself.”  A kind of obstinacy forced her on to enlarge upon the topic.  “I can give you an instance which will surprise you.”

“There is no need,” Chayne said, gently, but Sylvia was implacable.

“But there is need,” she returned.  “I beg you to hear me.  When my father and I were at Weymouth we drove one afternoon across the neck of the Chesil beach to Portland.”

Chayne looked at Sylvia quickly.

“Yes?” he said, and there was an indefinable change in his voice.  He had consented to listen, because she wished it.  Now he listened with a keen attention.  For a strange thought had crept into his mind.

“We drove up the hill toward the plateau at the top of the island, but as we passed through the village—­Fortune’s Well I think they call it—­my father stopped the carriage at a tobacconist’s, and went into the shop.  He came out again with some plugs of tobacco—­a good many—­and got into the carriage.  You won’t guess why he bought them.  I didn’t.”

“Well?” said Chayne, and now he spoke with suspense.  Suspense, too, was visible in his quiet attitude.  There was a mystery which for Sylvia’s sake he wished to unravel.  Why did Gabriel Strood now call himself Garratt Skinner?  That was the mystery.  But he must unravel it without doing any hurt to Sylvia.  He could not go too warily—­of that he had been sure, ever since Kenyon had refused to speak of it.  There might be some hidden thing which for Sylvia’s sake must not be brought to light.  Therefore he must find out the truth without help from any one.  He wondered whether unconsciously Sylvia herself was going to give him the clue.  Was she to tell him what she did not know herself—­why Gabriel Strood was now Garratt Skinner?  “Well?” he repeated.