“What occasion have I for a letter from Mr. Delamayn?”

She was determined to acknowledge nothing—­she kept him obstinately at arm’s-length.  Arnold did, as a matter of instinct, what a man of larger experience would have done, as a matter of calculation—­he closed with her boldly, then and there.

“Miss Silvester! it’s no use beating about the bush.  If you won’t take the letter, you force me to speak out.  I am here on a very unpleasant errand.  I begin to wish, from the bottom of my heart, I had never undertaken it.”

A quick spasm of pain passed across her face.  She was beginning, dimly beginning, to understand him.  He hesitated.  His generous nature shrank from hurting her.

“Go on,” she said, with an effort.

“Try not to be angry with me, Miss Silvester.  Geoffrey and I are old friends.  Geoffrey knows he can trust me—­”

“Trust you?” she interposed.  “Stop!”

Arnold waited.  She went on, speaking to herself, not to him.

“When I was in the other room I asked if Geoffrey was there.  And this man answered for him.”  She sprang forward with a cry of horror.

“Has he told you—­”

“For God’s sake, read his letter!”

She violently pushed back the hand with which Arnold once more offered the letter.  “You don’t look at me!  He has told you!”

“Read his letter,” persisted Arnold.  “In justice to him, if you won’t in justice to me.”

The situation was too painful to be endured.  Arnold looked at her, this time, with a man’s resolution in his eyes—­spoke to her, this time, with a man’s resolution in his voice.  She took the letter.

“I beg your pardon, Sir,” she said, with a sudden humiliation of tone and manner, inexpressibly shocking, inexpressibly pitiable to see.  “I understand my position at last.  I am a woman doubly betrayed.  Please to excuse what I said to you just now, when I supposed myself to have some claim on your respect.  Perhaps you will grant me your pity?  I can ask for nothing more.”

Arnold was silent.  Words were useless in the face of such utter self-abandonment as this.  Any man living—­even Geoffrey himself—­must have felt for her at that moment.

She looked for the first time at the letter.  She opened it on the wrong side.  “My own letter!” she said to herself.  “In the hands of another man!”

“Look at the last page,” said Arnold.

She turned to the last page, and read the hurried penciled lines.  “Villain! villain! villain!” At the third repetition of the word, she crushed the letter in the palm of her hand, and flung it from her to the other end of the room.  The instant after, the fire that had flamed up in her died out.  Feebly and slowly she reached out her hand to the nearest chair, and sat down in it with her back to Arnold.  “He has deserted me!” was all she said.  The words fell low and quiet on the silence:  they were the utterance of an immeasurable despair.