‘O Angus, is it so easy for you to forget the past?’

‘It was forgotten long ago,’ he answered, ’by both of us, I should think.  When my mother bribed you to leave Ilfracombe, you bartered my love and my happiness for the petty price she was able to pay.  I was a weak fool in those days, and I took the business to heart bitterly enough, God knows; but the lesson was a useful one, and it served its turn.  I have never trusted myself to love any woman since that day, till I met the pure young creature who is to be my wife.  Her truth is above all doubt; she will not sell her birthright for a mess of pottage.’

’The mess of pottage was not for me, Angus.  It was my father’s bargain, not mine.  I was told that you had done with me—­that you had never meant to marry me.  Yes, Angus, your mother told me that with her own lips—­told me that she interfered to save me from misery and dishonour.  And then I was hurried off to a cheap French convent, to learn to provide for myself.  A couple of years’ schooling was the price I received for my broken heart.  That was what your mother called making me a lady.  I think I should have gone mad in those two dreary years, if it had not been for my passionate love of music.  I gave myself up to that with my whole soul; my heart was dead; and they told me I made more progress in two years than other girls made in six.  I had nothing else to live for.’

‘Except the hope of a rich husband,’ said Mr. Egerton, with a sneer.

‘O God, how cruel a man can to be a woman he has once loved!’ cried Mrs. Darrell passionately.  ’Yes, I did marry a rich man, Angus; but I never schemed or tried to win him.  The chance came to me without a hope or a thought of mine.  It was the chance of rescue from the dreariest life of drudgery that a poor dependent creature ever lived, and I took it.  But I have never forgotten you, Angus Egerton, not for one hour of my life.’

‘I am sorry you should have taken the trouble to remember me,’ he answered very coldly.  ’For some years of my life I made it my chief business to forget you, and all the pain connected with our acquaintance; and having succeeded in doing that, it seems a pity that we should disturb the stagnant waters of that dead lake which men call the past.’

‘Would to God that we had never met again!’ she said.

’I can quite echo that aspiration, if we are likely to have many such scenes as this.’

‘Cruel—­cruel!’ she muttered.  ’O Angus, I have been so patient!  I have clung to hope in the face of despair.  When my husband died I fancied your old love would reawaken.  How can such things die?  I thought it was to me you would come back—­to me, whom you once loved so passionately—­not to that girl.  You came back to her, and still I was patient.  I set myself against her, to win back your love.  Yes, Angus, I hoped to do that till very lately.  And then I began to see that it was all useless.  She is younger and handsomer than I.’