“Who is that woman?” she asked.

Lady Jane was equal to the emergency.  The manner in which she wrapped herself up in her own virtue, without the slightest pretension on the one hand, and without the slightest compromise on the other, was a sight to see.

“Mr. Vanborough,” she said, “you offered to take me to my carriage just now.  I begin to understand that I had better have accepted the offer at once.  Give me your arm.”

“Stop!” said Mrs. Vanborough, “your ladyship’s looks are looks of contempt; your ladyship’s words can bear but one interpretation.  I am innocently involved in some vile deception which I don’t understand.  But this I do know—­I won’t submit to be insulted in my own house.  After what you have just said I forbid my husband to give you his arm.”

Her husband!

Lady Jane looked at Mr. Vanborough—­at Mr. Vanborough, whom she loved; whom she had honestly believed to be a single man; whom she had suspected, up to that moment, of nothing worse than of trying to screen the frailties of his friend.  She dropped her highly-bred tone; she lost her highly-bred manners.  The sense of her injury (if this was true), the pang of her jealousy (if that woman was his wife), stripped the human nature in her bare of all disguises, raised the angry color in her cheeks, and struck the angry fire out of her eyes.

“If you can tell the truth, Sir,” she said, haughtily, “be so good as to tell it now.  Have you been falsely presenting yourself to the world—­falsely presenting yourself to me—­in the character and with the aspirations of a single man?  Is that lady your wife?”

“Do you hear her? do you see her?” cried Mrs. Vanborough, appealing to her husband, in her turn.  She suddenly drew back from him, shuddering from head to foot.  “He hesitates!” she said to herself, faintly.  “Good God! he hesitates!”

Lady Jane sternly repeated her question.

“Is that lady your wife?”

He roused his scoundrel-courage, and said the fatal word: 

“No!”

Mrs. Vanborough staggered back.  She caught at the white curtains of the window to save herself from falling, and tore them.  She looked at her husband, with the torn curtain clenched fast in her hand.  She asked herself, “Am I mad? or is he?”

Lady Jane drew a deep breath of relief.  He was not married!  He was only a profligate single man.  A profligate single man is shocking—­but reclaimable.  It is possible to blame him severely, and to insist on his reformation in the most uncompromising terms.  It is also possible to forgive him, and marry him.  Lady Jane took the necessary position under the circumstances with perfect tact.  She inflicted reproof in the present without excluding hope in the future.

“I have made a very painful discovery,” she said, gravely, to Mr. Vanborough.  “It rests with you to persuade me to forget it!  Good-evening!”