He took the persuasive hand she laid upon his arm, but for several seconds he did not speak.  It seemed as if he could not trust himself to do so.

At last, “Christine,” he said, “I think that your husband ought to know.”

She started at the words, almost snatching her hand from him.  “Bertie!  What do you mean?  Know of what?”

He answered her with great steadiness; his eyes met hers unwaveringly.  “Of that which happened at Valpre,” he said.

She gazed at him in growing consternation.  “Bertie, how—­are you mad?—­how could I tell him that?”

“With your permission, I will tell him,” he said resolutely.

But she cried out at that, almost as if he had hurt her:  “Oh no, no, never!  Why should he know now?  Don’t you see how impossible it is?  If I had ever meant to tell him, it ought to have been long ago.”

“Yes,” said Bertrand.

The quietness of his tone only agitated her still further.  His evident determination terrified her.  In that moment all her fear of her husband rose to towering proportions, a monster she dared not even contemplate.  She clasped Bertrand’s arm between her hands in wild, unreasoning supplication.

“Oh, you must not—­you shall not!  Bertie, you won’t, will you?  Promise me you won’t—­promise me!  He wouldn’t understand.  He would want to know why I had never told him before.  He would—­he would—­”

“Ah! but I would explain,” Bertrand protested gently.

“But you couldn’t!  He would ask questions—­questions I couldn’t possibly answer.  If he didn’t say them he would look them.  And his eyes are so terribly keen.  They frighten me.  They see—­everything.”

“But, cherie,” he reasoned, “they could not see what is not there.  You have nothing to hide from him.  You have no shame.  Why, then, have you fear?”

“I don’t know,” gasped Chris.  “Only I know that he would never understand.  He would think—­he would think—­”

“He would think that we have been—­pals—­for as long as we have known each other,” said Bertrand soothingly.  “He knows it already.  It is true, is it not?”

But Chris’s eyes had been opened too suddenly and tragically.  Her sense of proportion was still undeveloped.  “Yes, but he would never see it.  You could never explain to him so that he would understand.  He would think I had been deceiving him.  He would think—­Bertie, he would think”—­her eyes dilated, and she drew in her breath sharply—­“that—­that you and I ought not to be friends any longer.  Oh, don’t tell him—­please don’t tell him.  Indeed I am right.  He trusts you, and—­and he trusts me.  But he wouldn’t trust either of us any longer if he knew.”

“Christine!  Christine!”

“It is true,” she asserted feverishly.  “You don’t know him as I do.  Oh no, he has never been hard to me.  But he could be hard.  And he wouldn’t forgive me—­if he thought I had been hiding anything.  Bertie, Bertie, you won’t do it?  Say you won’t do it!”