Rising as she did, he stood waiting for her to turn and say something else.  Now that the truth was dawning on her, it seemed to him as well to allow it to grow clear.  It would show her the futility of further opposition.  He would have been glad to keep her ignorant; he regretted the error into which she herself unwittingly had led him; but, since it had been committed, it would not be wholly a disaster if it summoned her to yield.

Having come to this conclusion, he had time to make another observation while she still stood with her back to him.  It was to consider himself fortunate in having ceased to be in love with her.  In view of all the circumstances, it was a great thing to have passed through that phase and come out of it.  He had read somewhere that a man is never twice in love with the same person.  If that were so, he could fairly believe himself immune, as after a certain kind of malady.  If it were not for this he would have found in her hostility to his efforts and her repugnance to his person a temptation—­a temptation to which he was specially liable in regard to living things—­to feel that it was his right to curb the spirit and tame the rebellion of whatever was restive to his control.  There was something in this haughty, high-strung creature, poising herself in silence to stand upright in the face of fate, that would have called forth his impulse to dominate her will, to subdue her lips to his own, if he had really cared.  Fortunately, he didn’t care, and so could seek her welfare with detachment.

Turning slowly, she stood grasping the back of the chair from which she had risen.  He always remembered afterward that it was a chair of which the flowing curves and rich interlacings of design contrasted with her subtly emphasized simplicity.  He had once had the morbid curiosity to watch, in an English law-court, the face and attitude of a woman—­a surgeon’s wife—­standing in the dock to be sentenced to death.  It seemed to him now that Olivia Guion stood like her—­with the same resoluteness, not so much desperate as slightly dazed.

“Wasn’t it for something of that kind—­something wrong with estates—­that Jack Berrington was sent to prison?”

The question took him unawares.  “I—­I don’t remember.”

“I do.  I should think you would.  The trial was in all the papers.  It was the Gray estate.  He was Mrs. Gray’s trustee.  He ruined the whole Gray family.”

“Possibly.”  He did his best to speak airily.  “In the matter of estates there are all sorts of hitches that can happen.  Some are worse than others, of course—­”

“I’ve seen his wife, Ada Berrington, once or twice, when I’ve been in Paris.  She lives there, waiting for him to come out of Singville.  She avoids her old friends when she can—­but I’ve seen her.”

“I think I remember hearing about them,” he said, for the sake of saying something; “but—­”

“I should like to go and talk with my father.  Would you mind waiting?”