The stranger looked keenly at Mr. Carlyle.  He was standing with his hat in his hand, on the point of going out.  “Will you pardon this intrusion?” she asked.  “I have come to you as one human being in need comes to crave help of another.  I am Lady Levison.”

Barbara’s face flushed.  Mr. Carlyle courteously invited the stranger to a chair, remaining standing himself.  She sat for a moment, and then rose, evidently in an excess of agitation.

“Yes, I am Lady Levison, forced to call that man husband.  That he has been a wicked man, I have long known; but now I hear he is a criminal.  I hear it, I say, but I can get the truth from none.  I went to Lord Mount Severn; he declined to give me particulars.  I heard that Mr. Carlyle would be in town to-day, and I resolved to come and ask them of him.”

She delivered the sentences in a jerking, abrupt tone, betraying her inward emotion.  Mr. Carlyle, looking somewhat unapproachable, made no immediate reply.

“You and I have both been deeply wronged by him, Mr. Carlyle, but I brought my wrong upon myself, you did not.  My sister, Blanche, whom he had cruelly treated—­and if I speak of it, I only speak of what is known to the world—­warned me against him.  Mrs. Levison, his grandmother, that ancient lady who must now be bordering upon ninety, she warned me.  The night before my wedding day, she came on purpose to tell me that if I married Francis Levison I should rue it for life.  There was yet time to retract she said.  Yes; there would have been time; but there was no will.  I would not listen to either.  I was led away by vanity, by folly, by something worse—­the triumphing over my own sister.  Poor Blanche!  But which has the best of the bargain now, she or I?  And I have a child,” she continued, dropping her voice, “a boy who inherits his father’s name.  Mr. Carlyle, will they condemn him?”

“Nothing, as yet, is positively proved against him,” replied Mr. Carlyle, compassionating the unhappy lady.

“If I could but get a divorce!” she passionately uttered, apparently losing all self-control.  “I might have got one, over and over again, since we married, but there would have been the expose and the scandal.  If I could but change my child’s name!  Tell me—­does any chance of redress remain for me?”

There was none, and Mr. Carlyle did not attempt to speak of any.  He offered a few kind words of sympathy, very generally expressed, and then prepared to go out.  She moved, and stood in his way.

“You will not leave until you have given me the particulars!  I pray you, do not!  I came trustingly to you, hoping to know them.”

“I am waited for, to keep an important engagement,” he answered.  “And were my time at liberty, I should decline to tell them to you, on my own account, as well as on yours.  Lay not discourtesy to my charge, Lady Levison.  Were I to speak of the man, even to you, his name would blister my lips.”