The suppressed passion in her began to force its way to the surface.

“Keep my temper?” she repeated.  “Do you of all men expect me to control myself?  What a memory yours must be!  Have you forgotten the time when I was fool enough to think you were fond of me? and mad enough to believe you could keep a promise?”

He persisted in trying to laugh it off.  “Mad is a strongish word to use, Miss Silvester!”

“Mad is the right word!  I look back at my own infatuation—­and I can’t account for it; I can’t understand myself.  What was there in you,” she asked, with an outbreak of contemptuous surprise, “to attract such a woman as I am?”

His inexhaustible good-nature was proof even against this.  He put his hands in his pockets, and said, “I’m sure I don’t know.”

She turned away from him.  The frank brutality of the answer had not offended her.  It forced her, cruelly forced her, to remember that she had nobody but herself to blame for the position in which she stood at that moment.  She was unwilling to let him see how the remembrance hurt her—­that was all.  A sad, sad story; but it must be told.  In her mother’s time she had been the sweetest, the most lovable of children.  In later days, under the care of her mother’s friend, her girlhood had passed so harmlessly and so happily—­it seemed as if the sleeping passions might sleep forever!  She had lived on to the prime of her womanhood—­and then, when the treasure of her life was at its richest, in one fatal moment she had flung it away on the man in whose presence she now stood.

Was she without excuse?  No:  not utterly without excuse.

She had seen him under other aspects than the aspect which he presented now.  She had seen him, the hero of the river-race, the first and foremost man in a trial of strength and skill which had roused the enthusiasm of all England.  She had seen him, the central object of the interest of a nation; the idol of the popular worship and the popular applause. His were the arms whose muscle was celebrated in the newspapers. He was first among the heroes hailed by ten thousand roaring throats as the pride and flower of England.  A woman, in an atmosphere of red-hot enthusiasm, witnesses the apotheosis of Physical Strength.  Is it reasonable—­is it just—­to expect her to ask herself, in cold blood, What (morally and intellectually) is all this worth?—­and that, when the man who is the object of the apotheosis, notices her, is presented to her, finds her to his taste, and singles her out from the rest?  No.  While humanity is humanity, the woman is not utterly without excuse.

Has she escaped, without suffering for it?