Thank God, that faithful love helped me, and I sat down again without saying a word.  She knew what I had suffered and what I had suppressed.  She ran round to me, with the tears streaming from her eyes.  “Oh, Marian!” she whispered softly.  “If my mother had been alive, she could have done no more for me!”

“Come back and sign!” cried Sir Percival from the other side of the table.

“Shall I?” she asked in my ear; “I will, if you tell me.”

“No,” I answered.  “The right and the truth are with you—­sign nothing, unless you have read it first.”

“Come back and sign!” he reiterated, in his loudest and angriest tones.

The Count, who had watched Laura and me with a close and silent attention, interposed for the second time.

“Percival!” he said.  “I remember that I am in the presence of ladies.  Be good enough, if you please, to remember it too.”

Sir Percival turned on him speechless with passion.  The Count’s firm hand slowly tightened its grasp on his shoulder, and the Count’s steady voice quietly repeated, “Be good enough, if you please, to remember it too.”

They both looked at each other.  Sir Percival slowly drew his shoulder from under the Count’s hand, slowly turned his face away from the Count’s eyes, doggedly looked down for a little while at the parchment on the table, and then spoke, with the sullen submission of a tamed animal, rather than the becoming resignation of a convinced man.

“I don’t want to offend anybody,” he said, “but my wife’s obstinacy is enough to try the patience of a saint.  I have told her this is merely a formal document—­and what more can she want?  You may say what you please, but it is no part of a woman’s duty to set her husband at defiance.  Once more, Lady Glyde, and for the last time, will you sign or will you not?”

Laura returned to his side of the table, and took up the pen again.

“I will sign with pleasure,” she said, “if you will only treat me as a responsible being.  I care little what sacrifice is required of me, if it will affect no one else, and lead to no ill results—­”

“Who talked of a sacrifice being required of You?” he broke in, with a half-suppressed return of his former violence.

“I only meant,” she resumed, “that I would refuse no concession which I could honourably make.  If I have a scruple about signing my name to an engagement of which I know nothing, why should you visit it on me so severely?  It is rather hard, I think, to treat Count Fosco’s scruples so much more indulgently than you have treated mine.”

This unfortunate, yet most natural, reference to the Count’s extraordinary power over her husband, indirect as it was, set Sir Percival’s smouldering temper on fire again in an instant.

“Scruples!” he repeated.  “Your scruples!  It is rather late in the day for you to be scrupulous.  I should have thought you had got over all weakness of that sort, when you made a virtue of necessity by marrying me.”