With a sudden instinct of self-preservation, she forcibly summoned back her composure.  She knew with whom she had to deal.  She must guard every look, every word.

“Will you tell me.  Miss Gascoigne, exactly who is talking about me, and what they say?  I am sure I have never given occasion for it.”

“Never?  Are you quite certain of that?”

“Quite certain.  Who said I had ’a very close acquaintance’—­were not these your words—­with Sir Edwin Uniacke?”

“Himself.”

“Himself!”

Then Christian recognized the whole amount of her difficulty—­nay, her danger; for she was in the power, not of a gentleman, but of a villain.  Any man must have been such who, under the circumstances, could have boasted of their former acquaintance, or even referred to it at all.

“Kiss and tell?” runs the disdainful proverb.  And even the worldliest of men, in their low code of honor, count the thing base and ignoble.  Alas! all women do not.

In the strangely mistaken code of feminine “honorable-ness,” it is deemed no disgrace for a woman to chatter and boast of a man’s love, but the utmost disgrace for her to own or feel on her side any love at all.  But Christian was unlike her sex in some things.  To her, with her creed of love, it would have appeared far less mean, less cowardly, less dishonorable, openly to confess, “I loved this man,” than to betray “This man loved me.”  And it was with almost contemptuous indignation that she repeated, “What! he told it himself?”

“He did.  I first heard it through Miss Bennett, your protégée, who has come back, and is now a governess at Mrs. Brereton’s.  But when I questioned Sir Edwin himself, he did not deny it.”

“You questioned him?”

“Certainly.  I felt it to be my duty.  He says that he knew you in your father’s lifetime; that he was intimate with you both:  that you and he used to sing duets together; in short, that—­”

“Go on.  I wish to hear it all.”

“That is all.  And I am sure, Mrs. Grey, it is enough.”

“It is enough.  And he has been saying this, and you have been listening to it, perhaps repeating it to all Avonsbridge.  What a wicked woman you must be!”

The words were said, not fiercely or resentfully, but in a sort of meditative, passive despair.  A sense of the wickedness, the cruelty there was in the world, the hopelessness of struggling against it, of disentangling fact from falsehood, of silencing malice and disarming envy, came upon Christian in a fit of bitterness uncontrollable.  She felt as if she could cry out, like David, “The waters have overwhelmed me, the deep waters have gone over my soul.”

Even if she were not blameless—­who is blameless in this mortal Life?—­ even if she had made a mistake—­a great mistake—­her punishment was sharp.  Just now, when happiness was dawning upon her, when the remorse for her hasty marriage and lack of love toward her husband had died away, when her heart was beginning to leap at the sound of his step, and her whole soul to sun itself in the tender light of his loving eyes, it was very, very hard!