The mist in which her expression had been for a moment wrapped fell away.  She flushed deeply.

“I told you I had done nothing vile!” she said, passionately.  “Did you believe me?”

Their eyes met in a shock of challenge and reply.

“Those things are not to be asked between you and me,” he said, with vehemence, and he held out his hand.  She just touched it—­proudly.  Then she drew a long breath.

“The day was—­just like other days.  He read me his poems—­in a cool place we found under the bank.  I thought he was rather absurd now and then—­and different from what he had been.  He talked of our going away—­and his not seeing me—­and how lonely he was.  And of course I was awfully sorry for him.  But it was all right till—­”

She paused and looked at Ashe.

“You remember the inn near Hamel Weir—­a few miles from Windsor—­that lonely little place.”

Ashe nodded.

“We dined there.  Afterwards we were to row to Windsor and come home by a train about ten.  We finished dinner early.  By-the-way, there were two other people there—­Lady Edith Manley and her boy.  They had rowed down from somewhere—­”

“Did Lady Edith—­”

“Yes—­she spoke to me.  She was going back to town—­to the Holland House party—­”

“Where she probably met mother?”

“She did meet her!” cried Kitty.  She pointed to a letter which she had thrown down as she entered.  “Your mother sent round this note to me this morning—­to ask when I should be at home.  And Wilson sent word—­There!  Of course I know she thinks I’m capable of anything.”

She looked at him, defiant, but very miserable and pale.

“Go on, please,” said Ashe.

“We finished dinner early.  There was a field behind the inn, and then a wood.  We strolled into the wood, and then Geoffrey—­well, he went mad!  He—­”

She bit her lip fiercely, struggling for composure—­and words.

“He proposed to you to throw me over?” said Ashe, as white as she.

With a sudden gesture she held out her arms—­like a piteous child.

“Oh! don’t stand there—­and look at me like that—­I can’t bear it.”

Ashe came—­unwillingly.  She perceived the reluctance, and with a flaming face she motioned him back, while she controlled herself enough to pour out her story.  Presently Ashe was able to reconstruct with tolerable clearness what had occurred.  Cliffe, intoxicated by the long day of intimacy and of solitude, by Kitty’s beauty and Kitty’s folly, aware that parting was near at hand, and trusting to the wildness of Kitty’s temperament, had suddenly assumed the language of the lover—­and a lover by no means uncertain of his ultimate answer.  So long as they understood each other—­that, indeed, for the present, was all he asked.  But she must know that she had broken off his marriage with Mary Lyster, and reopened in his nature all the old founts of passion and of storm.  It had been her sovereign will that he should love her; it had been achieved.  For her sake—­knowing himself for the seared and criminal being that he was—­for Ashe’s sake—­he had tried to resist her spell.  In vain.  A fatal fusion of their two natures—­imaginations—­sympathies—­had come about.  Each was interpenetrated by the other; and retreat was impossible.