“You deceived him too, then?” Pitilessly he asked the question.  He also had begun to feel that nothing could ever matter any more.

She wrung her hands in anguish.  Her face was still raised to his, white and strained and desperate—­the face of a woman who would never dissemble with him again.  “Yes,” she said, “I deceived him too.”

“Then”—­slowly he uttered the words—­“it was you who forged my name upon that cheque?  It actually was you whom he was shielding?  And you tell me that he did not know what it was for?”

“He did not know,” she said.  She would not have given such an explanation of her own volition at that moment, but—­since upon this point she could not tell him the truth—­it was simpler to let it pass.  What did it matter, after all?  Let him think her a thief also if he would!  She was past caring what he thought.

“And when do you expect to meet again?” Mordaunt asked, with great distinctness.

She flinched as if he had struck her.  “Oh, haven’t you tortured me enough?” she said.

His jaw hardened.  He stepped suddenly to her and took her by the shoulders.  His eyes appalled her.  It was as if a devil looked out of them.  She shrank away from him in sheer physical terror.

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid,” he said.  “I shan’t hurt you.  Why should I?  You are nothing to me.  But—­for the last time—­let me hear you speak the truth.  You love this man?”

The words, curt and cold, might have fallen from the lips of a stranger, so impersonal were they, so utterly devoid of any emotion.

Wide-eyed, she faced him, for she could not look away with his hands upon her, compelling her.

“You love this man?” he repeated, his speech still cold but incisive—­a sharp weapon probing for the truth.

She caught her quivering nerves together, and valiantly answered him.  “I do!” she said.  “I do!” And as she spoke, the power within her surged upwards, defying constraint, dominating her with a mastery irresistible.  She suddenly stripped her heart bare of all reserve and showed him the love that agonized there.  “I have always loved him!” she said.  “I shall love him till I die!”

It was a woman’s confession, in which triumph and anguish were strangely mingled.  In a calmer moment she would never have made it, but that moment was supreme, and she had no choice.  Regardless of all consequences, she told the burning truth.  She would have told it with his hands upon her throat.

In the silence that followed the avowal she even waited for violence.  But she was unafraid.  The greatness of the power that possessed her had lifted her above all fear.  She trod the heights where fear is not.  And all-unconsciously, in that moment she won a battle which she had deemed irrevocably lost.

Mordaunt’s hands fell from her, setting her free.  “In Heaven’s name,” he said, “why didn’t you go with him?”

She did not understand his tone.  It held neither anger nor contempt, and so quiet was it that she could still have fancied it almost indifferent.  Yet, inexplicably, it cut her to the heart.