“Your recollection serves you too well, Major Waring.  I was a girl.  You judged the acts of a woman.  I was a girl, and you chose to put your own interpretation on whatever I did.  You scourged me before the whole army.  Was not that enough?  I mean, enough for you?  For me, perhaps not, for I have suffered since, and may have been set apart to suffer.  I saw you in that little church at Warbeach; I met you in the lanes; I met you on the steamer; on the railway platform; at the review.  Everywhere you kept up the look of my judge.  You! and I have been ‘Margaret’ to you.  Major Waring, how many a woman in my place would attribute your relentless condemnation of her to injured vanity or vengeance?  In those days I trifled with everybody.  I played with fire.  I was ignorant of life.  I was true to my husband; and because I was true, and because I was ignorant, I was plunged into tragedies I never suspected.  This is to be what you call a coquette.  Stamping a name saves thinking.  Could I read my husband’s temper?  Would not a coquette have played her cards differently?  There never was need for me to push my husband to a contest.  I never had the power to restrain him.  Now I am wiser; and now is too late; and now you sit in judgement on me.  Why?  It is not fair; it is unkind.”

Tears were in her voice, though not in her eyes.

Major Waring tried to study her with the coolness of a man who has learnt to doubt the truth of women; but he had once yearned in a young man’s frenzy of love to take that delicate shape in his arms, and he was not proof against the sedate sweet face and keen sad ring of the voice.

He spoke earnestly.

“You honour me by caring for my opinion.  The past is buried.  I have some forgiveness to ask.  Much, when I think of it—­very much.  I did you a public wrong.  From a man to a woman it was unpardonable.  It is a blot on my career.  I beg you humbly to believe that I repent it.”

The sun was flaming with great wings red among the vapours; and in the recollection of the two, as they rode onward facing it, arose that day of the forlorn charge of English horse in the Indian jungle, the thunder and the dust, the fire and the dense knot of the struggle.  And like a ghost sweeping across her eyeballs, Mrs. Lovell beheld, part in his English freshness, part ensanguined, the image of the gallant boy who had ridden to perish at the spur of her mad whim.  She forgot all present surroundings.

“Percy!” she said.

“Madam?”

“Percy!”

“Margaret?”

“Oh, what an undying day, Percy!”

And then she was speechless.

CHAPTER XXVII