‘You can do as you like, my dear,’ Colonel Askerton had said on the previous evening to his wife.  He had listened to all she had been saying without taking his eyes from off his newspaper, though she had spoken with much eagerness.

‘But that is not enough.  You should say more to me than that.’

’Now I think you are unreasonable.  For myself, I do not care how this matter goes; nor do I care one straw what any tongues may say.  They cannot reach me, excepting so far as they may reach me through you.’

‘But you should advise me.’

’I always do copiously, when I think that I know better than you; but in this matter I feel so sure that you know better than I, that I don’t wish to suggest anything.’  Then he went on with his newspaper, and she sat for a while looking at him, as though she expected that something more would be said.  But nothing more was said, and she was left entirely to her own guidance.

Since the days in which her troubles had come upon Mrs Askerton, Clara Amedroz was the first female friend who had come near her to comfort her, and she was very loth to abandon such comfort.  There had, too, been something more than comfort, something almost approaching to triumph, when she found that Clara had clung to her with affection after hearing the whole story of her life.  Though her conscience had not pricked her while she was exercising all her little planned deceits, she had not taken much pleasure in them.  How should any one take pleasure in such work?  Many of us daily deceive our friends, and are so far gone in deceit that the deceit alone is hardly painful to us.  But the need of deceiving a friend is always painful.  The treachery is easy; but to be treacherous to those we love is never easy never easy, even though it be so common.  There had been a double delight to this poor woman in the near neighbourhood of Clara Amedroz since there had ceased to be a necessity for falsehood on her part.  But now, almost before her joy had commenced, almost before she had realized the sweetness of her triumph, had come upon her this task of doing that herself which Clara in her generosity had refused to do.  ’I have made my bed and I must lie upon it,’ she said.  And then, instead of going down to the house as she had promised, she wrote the following letter to Miss Amedroz: 

’The Cottage, Monday.

Dearest Clara

I need not tell you that I write as I do now with a bleeding heart.  A few days since I should have laughed at any woman who used such a phrase of herself, and declared her to be an affected fool; but now I know how true such a word may be.  My heart is bleeding, and I feel myself to be overcome by my disgrace.  You told me that I did not understand you yesterday.  Of course I understood you.  Of course I know how it all is, and why you spoke as you did of Captain Aylmer.  He has chosen to think that you could not know me without pollution, and has determined that you must give up either me or him.  Though he has judged me, I am not going to judge him.  The world is on his side; and, perhaps, he is right.  He knows nothing of my trials and difficulties and why should he?  I do not blame him for demanding that his future wife shall not be intimate with a woman who is supposed to have lost her fitness for the society of women.