“You were in town last night,” she said, and by her look more than her words he was brought face to face with the suspicion that she was capable of a jealous outburst.

“I wanted to come, but I couldn’t,” he answered, with an attempt at his quizzical humour.  “I rushed here as soon as I dared this morning—­isn’t that enough to prove something?”

Again he made a movement to take her in his arms, but her face was so unyielding that his hands, which he had outstretched, fell to his sides.  From the look in her eyes he could almost believe that she had grown to hate him in the night; and at the thought his earlier impetuous emotion flamed in his heart.

“Don’t lie to me,” she said passionately, “there’s nothing I hate so much as a lie.”

“I never lied to you in my life,” he answered, as he drew back with an expression of cold reproach—­for it seemed to him that her attack had offered an unpardonable affront to his honour.

“When you did not come I sent a note to you—­I feared something had happened—­I hardly knew what—­but something.  The note came back.  They told the messenger—­” the words were wrenched out of her as by some act of bodily torture, and, at last, in spite of her struggle, she could go no further.  Pausing she looked at him in silence, while her hand pressed into her bosom as if to keep down by physical force the passion which she could no longer control by a mental effort.  The violence of temper which in a coarser—­a more flesh-and-blood beauty—­would have been repelling and almost vulgar, was in her chastened and ennobled by the ethereal quality in her outward form—­and the emotion she expressed seemed to belong less to the ordinary human impulses than to some finer rage of spirit which was independent of the gesture or the utterance of flesh.

“And you suspected what?” he demanded, in a hurt and angry voice, “you were told some story by a servant—­and without waiting for my explanation—­without giving me a decent chance to clear myself—­you were ready, on the instant, to believe me capable—­of what?”

Her suspicion worked him into a furious resentment; and the consciousness that he, himself, was at fault was swallowed up by the greater wrong of her unuttered accusation.  While he spoke he was honestly of the opinion that their whole future happiness was wrecked by the fact that she believed him capable of the thing which he had done.

“I would die now before I would justify myself to you,” he added.

Before the unaffected resentment in his face, she was suddenly, and without knowing it, thrown into a position of defence.

“What could I believe?  What else was there for me to believe?” she asked in a muffled voice.  Then, as she looked up at him, it seemed to her that for the first time she saw the man as he really was in the truth of his own nature—­saw his egoism, his vanity, his shallowness and saw, too, with the same mental clearness, that he had ceased to love her.  But at the instant with this vision before her, she told herself that the discovery made no difference—­that it no longer mattered whether he loved or hated her.  Afterward, when he had gone, her perceptions would be blunted again and she would suffer, she knew; but now, while she stood there face to face with him, she could not feel that he bore any vital part in her existence.