Kitty nodded.

Ashe thought.  Her admission took him back to the autumn weeks at Haggart, after the Cliffe crisis and the rearrangement of the ministry in the July of that year.  He well remembered that those weeks had been weeks of special happiness for both of them.  Afterwards, the winter had brought many renewed qualms and vexations.  But in that period, between the storms of the session and Kitty’s escapades in the hunting-field, memory recalled a tender, melting time—­a time rich in hidden and exquisite hours, when with Kitty on his breast, lip to lip and heart to heart, he had reaped, as it seemed to him, the fruits of that indulgence which, as he knew, his mother scorned.  And at that very moment, behind his back, out of his sight, she had begun this atrocious thing.

He looked at her again—­the bitterness almost at his lips, almost beyond his control.

“I wish I knew what could have been your possible object in writing it?”

She sat up and confronted him.  The color flamed back again into her pale cheeks.

“You know I told you—­when we had that talk in London—­that I wanted to write.  I thought it would be good for me—­would take my thoughts off—­well, what had happened.  And I began to write this—­and it amused me to find I could do it—­and I suppose I got carried away.  I loved describing you, and glorifying you—­and I loved making caricatures of Lady Parham—­and all the people I hated.  I used to work at it whenever you were away—­or I was dull and there was nothing to do.

“Did it never occur to you,” said Ashe, interrupting, “that it might get you—­get us both—­into trouble, and that you ought to tell me?”

She wavered.

“No!” she said, at last.  “I never did mean to tell you, while I was writing it.  You know I don’t tell lies, William!  The real fact is, I was afraid you’d stop it.”

“Good God!” He threw up his hands with a sound of amazement, then thrust them again into his pockets and began to pace up and down.

“But then”—­she resumed—­“I thought you’d soon get over it, and that it was funny—­and everybody would laugh—­and you’d laugh—­and there would be an end of it.”

He turned and stared at her.  “Frankly, Kitty—­I don’t understand what you can be made of!  You imagined that that sketch of Lord Parham”—­he struck the open page—­“a sketch written by my wife, describing my official chief—­when he was my guest—­under my own roof—­with all sorts of details of the most intimate and offensive kind—­mocking his speech—­his manners—­his little personal ways—­charging him with being the corrupt tool of Lady Parham, disloyal to his colleagues, a man not to be trusted—­and justifying all this by a sort of evidence that you could only have got as my wife and Lord Parham’s hostess—­you actually supposed that you could write and publish that!—­without in the first place its being plain to every Tom, Dick,