“Of course I do!”

Her eyelids wavered a little under the emotion of his tone.

“Well, then, we got married.  My brother tried to get out of him what his money-affairs were.  But he always evaded everything.  He talked a great deal about this rich sister, and she did send him a wedding present.  But he never showed me her letter, and that was the last we ever heard of her while I knew him....”

Her voice dropped.  She sat looking at the fire—­a grey, pale woman, from whom light and youth had momentarily gone out.

“Well, it’s a hateful story—­and as common!—­as common as dirt.  We began to quarrel almost immediately.  He was jealous and tyrannical, and I always had a quick temper.  I found that he drank, that he told me all sorts of lies about his past life, that he presently only cared about me as—­well, as his mistress!”—­and again she faced Ellesborough with hard, insistent eyes—­“that he was hopelessly in debt—­a gambler—­and everything else.  When the baby came, I could only get the wife of a neighbouring settler to come and look after me.  And Roger behaved so abominably to her that she went home when the baby was a week old—­and I was left to manage for myself.  Then when baby was three months old, she caught whooping-cough, and had bronchitis on the top.  I had a few pounds of my own, and I gave them to Roger to go in to Winnipeg and bring out a doctor and medicines.  He drank all the money on the way—­that I found out afterwards—­he was a week away instead of two days—­and the baby died.  When he came back he told me a lie about having been ill.  But I never lived with him—­as a wife—­after that.  Then, of course, he hated me, and one night he nearly killed me.  Next morning he apologized—­said that he loved me passionately—­and that kind of stuff—­that I was cruel to him—­and what could he do to make up?  So then I suggested that he should go away for a month—­and we should both think things over.  He was rather frightened, because—­well—­he’d knocked me about a good deal in the horrible scene between us—­and he thought I should bring my brother down on him.  So he agreed to go, and I said I would have a girl friend to stay with me.  But, of course, as soon as he was gone, I just left the house and departed.  I had got evidence enough by then to set me free—­about the Italian girl.  I met my brother in Winnipeg.  We went to his lawyers together, and I began proceedings—­”

She stopped abruptly.  “The rest I told you.—­No!—­I’ve told you the horrible things—­now I’ll say something of the things which—­have made life worth living again.  Till the divorce was settled I went back to my brother in Toronto.  I dropped my married name then and called myself Henderson.  And then I came home—­because my mother’s brother, who was a manufacturer in Bradford, wrote to ask me.  But when I arrived he was dead, and he had left me three thousand pounds.  Then I went to Swanley and got trained for farm-work.  And