He broke off and stood waiting with a half angry, half baffled look; and then as she was still silent he picked up a red leather box from the table, laid it down again and came nearer to where she stood.

“Is it all a lie, Laura?” he demanded.

The justification which she had attempted alone in the night came back to her while she stood there with her hands, which felt like dead things, hanging limp at her sides.  “It was so very little that it escaped my memory,” was what she had said to herself in the darkness; but now, face to face with him in the light of day, she could not bring her mind to think these words nor her lips to utter them.

“No, it isn’t a lie—­it is true,” she answered.

“It is true?” he repeated in an astonishment which gave place to anger as he went on.  “Do you mean you really met her in my rooms?”

“I met her there—­I met her there!” she rejoined in a bitter triumph of truth which seemed, somehow, a relief to her.

“And you did not tell me?”

She shook her head.  “I’d never have told you.”

“But the letter?  What became of the letter?”

She had drawn a step away from him, not in any fresh spirit of evasion, but that she might gain a better view of the look with which he confronted her.  Her eyes had not wavered from his since the first question he had asked, but her hands were nervously knotting and unknotting a silver cord which she had picked up from a jeweller’s box upon the table at her side.

“Why didn’t I get the letter, Laura?” he asked again.

“Because I burned it,” she answered slowly, “I burned it in the fire in your room just before you came in—­I burned it,” she repeated for the third time, raising her voice to clearer distinctness.

A dark flush rose to his face and the sombre colour gave him an almost brutal look.

“In God’s name why did you do it?” he asked; and she saw the contempt in his eyes as she had seen it before in her imagination.  “I am to presume, I suppose, that you were prompted by jealousy?” he added.  “An amiable beginning for a marriage.”

“I don’t know why I did it,” she replied, in a voice which was so constrained as to sound unfeeling.  “I didn’t know at the time and I don’t know now.  Yes, I suppose jealousy is as good a reason as any other.”

“And is this what I am to expect in the future?” he enquired, with an irony which he might as well have flung at a figure of wood.  “Good God!” he exclaimed as his righteous resentment swept from his mind all recollection of his own relapses.  “Are you willing to marry a man whom you can’t trust out of your sight?”

The force with which he uttered the words drove them so deeply into his consciousness that he was convinced by his own violence of the justice in the stand he took.  “Have you absolutely no faith in me?” he demanded.

For a moment the question occupied her thoughts.