Did he understand?  Would he respond if he did; or would the shock of her appeal restore him to a sense of the danger attending disloyalty?  For a moment she doubted the wisdom of this startling measure, then she saw that he had passed the point of surprise and that, stranger as she was, she had but to lead the way for him to follow, tell his story, and die.

There was no light in the drawing-room when they entered.  But old Mr. Dunbar did not seem to mind that.  Indeed, he seemed to have lost all consciousness of present surroundings; he was even oblivious of her.  This became quite evident when the lamp, in flaring up again in the hall, gave a momentary glimpse, of his crouching, half-kneeling figure.  In the pleading gesture of his trembling, outreaching arms, Violet beheld an appeal, not to herself, but to some phantom of his imagination; and when he spoke, as he presently did, it was with the freedom of one to whom speech is life’s last boon, and the ear of the listener quite forgotten in the passion of confession long suppressed.

“She has never loved me,” he began, “but I have always loved her.  For me no other woman has ever existed, though I was sixty-five years of age when I first saw her, and had long given up the idea that there lived a woman who could sway me from my even life and fixed lines of duty.  Sixty-five! and she a youthful bride!  Was there ever such folly!  Happily I realized it from the first, and piled ashes on my hidden flame.  Perhaps that is why I adore her to this day and only give her over to reprobation because Fate is stronger than my age—­stronger even than my love.

“She is not a good woman, but I might have been a good man if I had never known the sin which drew a line of isolation about her, and within which I, and only I, have stood with her in silent companionship.  What was this sin, and in what did it have its beginning?  I think its beginning was in the passion she had for her husband.  It was not the every-day passion of her sex in this land of equable affections, but one of foreign fierceness, jealousy, and insatiable demand.  Yet he was a very ordinary man.  I was once his tutor and I know.  She came to know it too, when—­ but I am rushing on too fast, I have much to tell before I reach that point.

“From the first, I was in their confidence.  Not that either he or she put me there, but that I lived with them and was always around, and could not help seeing and hearing what went on between them.  Why he continued to want me in the house and at his table, when I could no longer be of service to him, I have never known.  Possibly habit explains all.  He was accustomed to my presence and so was she; so accustomed they hardly noticed it, as happened one night, when after a little attempt at conversation, he threw down the book he had caught up and, addressing her by name, said without a glance my way, and quite as if he were alone with her: 

“’Arabella, there is something I ought to tell you.  I have tried to find the courage to do so many times before now but have always failed.  Tonight I must.’  And then he made his great disclosure,—­how, unknown to, his friends and the world, he was a widower when he married her, and the father of a living child.