feel sick and choked.  I couldn’t breathe now in a house like Maxwell Court.  The poor have come to mean to me the only people who really live, and really suffer.  I must live with them, work for them, find out what I can do for them.  You must give me up—­you must indeed.  Oh! and you will!  You will be glad enough, thankful enough, when—­when—­you know what I am!”

He started at the words.  Where was the prophetess?  He saw that she was lying white and breathless, her face hidden against the arm of the chair.

In an instant he was on his knees beside her.

“Marcella!” he could hardly command his voice, but he held her struggling hand against his lips.  “You think that suffering belongs to one class?  Have you really no conception of what you will be dealing to me if you tear yourself away from me?”

She withdrew her hand, sobbing.

“Don’t, don’t stay near me!” she said; “there is—­more—­there is something else.”

Aldous rose.

“You mean,” he said in an altered voice, after a pause of silence, “that another influence—­another man—­has come between us?”

She sat up, and with a strong effort drove back her weeping.

“If I could say to you only this,” she began at last, with long pauses, “’I mistook myself and my part in life.  I did wrong, but forgive me, and let me go for both our sakes’—­that would be—­well!—­that would be difficult,—­but easier than this!  Haven’t you understood at all?  When—­when Mr. Wharton came, I began to see things very soon, not in my own way, but in his way.  I had never met any one like him—­not any one who showed me such possibilities in myself—­such new ways of using one’s life, and not only one’s possessions—­of looking at all the great questions.  I thought it was just friendship, but it made me critical, impatient of everything else.  I was never myself from the beginning.  Then,—­after the ball,”—­he stooped over her that he might hear her the more plainly,—­“when I came home I was in my room and I heard steps—­there are ghost stories, you know, about that part of the house.  I went out to see.  Perhaps, in my heart of hearts—­oh, I can’t tell, I can’t tell!—­anyway, he was there.  We went into the library, and we talked.  He did not want to touch our marriage,—­but he said all sorts of mad things,—­and at last—­he kissed me.”

The last words were only breathed.  She had often pictured herself confessing these things to him.  But the humiliation in which she actually found herself before him was more than she had ever dreamed of, more than she could bear.  All those great words of pity and mercy—­all that implication of a moral atmosphere to which he could never attain—­to end in this story!  The effect of it, on herself, rather than on him, was what she had not foreseen.

Aldous raised himself slowly.

“And when did this happen?” he asked after a moment.