She obeyed in silence, with her face grown grave enough in anticipation of the coming disclosures.  She knew that the first plunge into them would be keenly painful to her, but there was a feeling at her heart that, this penance over, a great relief would be at hand.  She trusted this man as she would have trusted her own father.  She knew that there was nothing on earth he would not attempt if he fancied it would help her.  And she knew, too, that having experienced so much of his great unselfishness and kindness and thoughtfulness, she was ready to obey him implicitly in anything that he could assure her was right for her to do.

How far away seemed the white cliffs now, and the faint green downs above them!  Brighton, lying farther to the west, had become dim and yellow, and over it a cloud of smoke lay thick and brown in the sunlight.  A mere streak showed the line of the King’s road and all its carriages and people; the beach beneath could just be made out by the white dots of the bathing-machines; the brown fishing-boats seemed to be close in shore; the two piers were fore-shortened into small dusky masses marking the beginning of the sea.  And then from these distant and faintly-defined objects out here to the side of the small white-and-pink boat, that lay lightly in the lapping water, stretched that great and moving network of waves, with here and there a sharp gleam of white foam curling over amid the dark blue-green.

Ingram took his seat by Sheila’s side, so that he should not have to look in her downcast face; and then, with some little preliminary nervousness and hesitation, the girl told her story.  She told it to sympathetic ears, and yet Ingram, having partly guessed how matters stood, and anxious, perhaps, to know whether much of her trouble might not be merely the result of fancies which could be reasoned and explained away, was careful to avoid anything like corroboration.  He let her talk in her own simple and artless way; and the girl spoke to him, after a little while, with an earnestness which showed how deeply she felt her position.  At the very outset she told him that her love for her husband had never altered for a moment—­that all the prayer and desire of her heart was that they two might be to each other as she had at one time hoped they would be, when he got to know her better.  She went over all the story of her coming to London, of her first experiences there, of the conviction that grew upon her that her husband was somehow disappointed with her, and only anxious now that she should conform to the ways and habits of the people with whom he associated.  She spoke of her efforts to obey his wishes, and how heartsick she was with her failures, and of the dissatisfaction which he showed.  She spoke of the people to whom he devoted his life, of the way in which he passed his time, and of the impossibility of her showing him, so long as he thus remained apart from her, the love she had in her heart for him, and