“Maude!  Maude!  It is wrong to say this.  You are not likely to die.”

“I can’t tell.  All I say is, I shall be glad for some things, if I do.”

“What is all this?” he exclaimed, after a bewildered pause.  “Is there anything on your mind, Maude?  Are you grieving after that little infant?”

“No,” she answered, “not for him.  I grieve for the two who remain.”

Lord Hartledon looked at her.  A dread, which he strove to throw from him, struggling to his conscience.

“I think you are deceived in my state of health.  And if I object to going to the seaside, it is chiefly because I would not die in a strange place.  If I am to die, I should like to die at Hartledon.”

His hair seemed to rise up in horror at the words.  “Maude! have you any disease you are concealing from me?”

“Not any.  But the belief has been upon me for some time that I should not get over this.  You must have seen how I appear to be sinking.”

“And with no disease upon you!  I don’t understand it.”

“No particular physical disease.”

“You are weak, dispirited—­I cannot pursue these questions,” he broke off.  “Tell me in a word:  is there any cause for this?”

“Yes.”

Percival gathered up his breath.  “What is it?”

“What is it!” her eyes ablaze with sudden light.  “What has weighed you down, not to the grave, for men are strong, but to terror, and shame, and sin?  What secret is it, Lord Hartledon?”

His lips were whitening.  “But it—­even allowing that I have a secret—­need not weigh you down.”

“Not weigh me down!—­to terror deeper than yours; to shame more abject?  Suppose I know the secret?”

“You cannot know it,” he gasped.  “It would have killed you.”

“And what has it done?  Look at me.”

“Oh, Maude!” he wailed, “what is it that you do, or do not know?  How did you learn anything about it?”

“I learnt it through my own folly.  I am sorry for it now.  My knowing it can make the fact neither better nor worse; and perhaps I might have been spared the knowledge to the end.”

“But what is it that you know?” he asked, rather wishing at the moment he was dead himself.

“All.”

“It is impossible.”

“It is true.”

And he felt that it was true; here was the solution to the conduct which had puzzled him, puzzled the doctors, puzzled the household and the countess-dowager.

“And how—­and how?” he gasped.

“When that stranger was here last, I heard what he said to you,” she replied, avowing the fact without shame in the moment’s terrible anguish.  “I made the third at the interview.”

He looked at her in utter disbelief.

“You refused to let me go down.  I followed you, and stood at the little door of the library.  It was open, and I—­heard—­every word.”