“Whom am I to believe?” she cried scornfully.  “Why did you say it?  What was the good of it—­a lie like that?  It is a lie, I suppose?”

“Yes, yes!” said the girl hysterically, “it seems so.  Oh, let me go, madam!  I’m sorry I told you.  I’ll trouble nobody much longer.  Call it a lie.”

She threw out her hands helplessly; she would have fallen, but Rainham caught her wrist, drew her toward him, supporting her with an arm.

“Come,” he said firmly, “this is no place for us.”

Eve regarded them all strangely, vaguely, the terror gradually dying out of her eyes—­Lightmark expressionless and silent, as he had been all through the interview; the woman trembling on Rainham’s arm, who stood beside her with his downcast eyes, the picture of conscious guilt.  A curious anguish too pale to be indignation plucked at her heart-strings—­anguish in which, unaccountably, the false charge against her husband was scarcely considered; that had become altogether remote and unreal, something barely historical, fading already away in the dim shadows of the past.  What hurt her, with a dull pain which she could not analyse, was the sudden tarnishing of a scarcely-admitted ideal by Rainham’s deliberate confession, making life appear for the moment intolerably sordid and mean.  Would she have owned to herself that, with an almost unconscious instinct, she had judged these two men all along by a different standard?  Hardly:  she loved her husband, and her marriage had not yet dissipated the memory of those golden days of illusion preceding it, in which her love had been of a finer kind.  Only that time, in which it would have been impossible for her to judge him, in which he could only do right in her eyes, was gone.  Occasions had arrived when they had inevitably to differ, on which the girl had gently acquiesced—­if not without a touch of scorn—­in his action, but had not felt obliged to accept his point of view.  There had been times when her pride had suffered—­for underneath her childish exterior, her air of being just a dainty little figure of Watteau, she had a very sensitive and delicate pride of her own—­and then, if she had succeeded in forgiving Lightmark, it had not been without an effort which had made it difficult for her to pardon herself.  Sometimes, though she would scarcely have confessed it, her husband’s mere approbativeness had almost shocked her.  It was good, no doubt, to be popular, harmless even, to care for popularity—­at least, one’s traditions declared nothing to the contrary; but to care so exorbitantly as Lightmark appeared to do, to sacrifice so much to one’s enthusiasm for pleasing inferior people—­people whom, behind their backs, one was quite ready to tear to pieces, allowing them neither intelligence nor virtue—­in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure.  Surely she loved him, and was ready to forgive him much:  not for worlds would she have confessed to disillusion.