“It was at Blakely.  We were so far out of the world—­such a different world.  I think that I had forgotten all that I wished to forget.  Everything seemed possible there.”

“You mean that you would have married me and told me nothing of circumstances in your life, so momentous that they have practically exercised in this matter of your return to politics a compelling influence over you?”

“I am sure,” he said, “that I should not have told you!”

His unhappiness moved her.  She still lingered.  She drew a little breath, and she went a good deal further than she had meant to go.

“It has been suggested to me,” she said, “that your reappearance was due to a woman’s influence.  Is this true?”

“A woman had something to do with it,” he admitted.

“Who is she?”

“Her name,” he answered, “is Blanche Phillimore.  It was the person to whom you yourself alluded.”

The Duchess maintained her self-control.  She was quite pale, however, and her tone was growing ominously harder.

“Is she a connection of yours?”

“No!”

“Is there anything which you could tell me about her?”

“No!”

“Yet at her bidding you have done—­what you refused me.”

“I had no choice!  Borrowdean saw to that,” he remarked, bitterly.

She rose to her feet.  She was pale, and her lips were quivering, but she was splendidly handsome.

“What sort of a man are you, Lawrence Mannering?” she asked, steadily.  “You play at idealism, you asked me to marry you.  Yet all the time there was this background.”

“It was madness,” he admitted.  “But remember it was Mrs. Handsell whom I asked to be my wife.”

“What difference does that make?  She was a woman, too, I suppose, to be honoured—­or insulted—­by your choice!”

“There was no question of insult, I think.”

She looked at him steadfastly.  Perhaps for a moment her thoughts travelled back to those unforgotten days in the rose-gardens at Blakely, to the man whose delicate but wholesome joy in the wind and the sun and the flowers, the sea-stained marshes and the windy knolls where they had so often stood together, she could not forget.  His life had seemed to her then so beautiful a thing.  The elementary purity of his thoughts and aspirations were unmistakable.  She told herself passionately that there must be a way out.

“Lawrence,” she said, “we are man and woman, not boy and girl.  You asked me to marry you once, and I hesitated, only because of one thing.  I do not wish to look into any hidden chambers of your life.  I wish to know nothing, save of the present.  What claim has this woman Blanche Phillimore upon you?”

“It is her secret,” he answered, “not mine alone.”

“She lives in your house—­through her you are a poor man—­through her you are back again, a worker in the world.”

“Yes!”