Lord Hartledon caught his wife’s hand.

“Carr, stay here with her and tell her all.  No good concealing anything now she has read this letter.  Tell her for me, for she would never listen to me.”

He drew his wife into an adjoining room, the one where the portrait of George Elster looked down on its guests.  The time for disclosing the story to his wife had been somewhat forestalled.  He would have given half his life that it had never reached that other woman, miserable old sinner though she was.

“You are trembling, Anne; you need not do so.  It is not against you that I have sinned.”

Yes, she was trembling very much.  And Val, in his honourable, his refined, shrinking nature, would have given his life’s other half not to have had the tale to tell.

It is not a pleasant one.  You may skip it if you please, and go on to the last page.  Val once said he had been more sinned against than sinning:  it may be deemed that in that opinion he was too lenient to himself.  Anne, his wife, listened with averted face and incredulous ears.

“You have wanted a solution to my conduct, Anne—­to the strange preference I seemed to accord the poor boy who is gone; why I could not punish him; why I was more thankful for the boon of his death than I had been for his life.  He was my child, but he was not Lord Elster.”

She did not understand.

“He had no right to my name; poor little Maude has no right to it.  Do you understand me now?”

Not at all; it was as though he were talking Greek to her.

“Their mother, when they were born, was not my wife.”

“Their mother was Lady Maude Kirton,” she rejoined, in her bewilderment.

“That is exactly where it was,” he answered bitterly.  “Lady Maude Kirton, not Lady Hartledon.”

She could not comprehend the words; her mind was full of consternation and tumult.  Back went her thoughts to the past.

“Oh, Val!  I remember papa’s saying that a marriage in that unused chapel was only three parts legal!”

“It was legal enough, Anne:  legal enough.  But when that ceremony took place”—­his voice dropped to a miserable whisper, “I had—­as they tell me—­a wife living.”

Slowly she admitted the meaning of the words; and would have started from him with a faint cry, but that he held her to him.

“Listen to the whole, Anne, before you judge me.  What has been your promise to me, over and over again?—­that, if I would tell you my sorrow, you would never shrink from me, whatever it might be.”

She remembered it, and stood still; terribly rebellious, clasping her fingers to pain, one within the other.

“In that respect, at any rate, I did not willingly sin.  When I married Maude I had no suspicion that I was not free as air; free to marry her, or any other woman in the world.”

“You speak in enigmas,” she said faintly.