“May I trust to your kindness to excuse me, Madame Fosco, if I venture to speak to you on an exceedingly painful subject?”

She crossed her hands in front of her and bowed her head solemnly, without uttering a word, and without taking her eyes off mine for a moment.

“When you were so good as to bring me back my handkerchief,” I went on, “I am very, very much afraid you must have accidentally heard Laura say something which I am unwilling to repeat, and which I will not attempt to defend.  I will only venture to hope that you have not thought it of sufficient importance to be mentioned to the Count?”

“I think it of no importance whatever,” said Madame Fosco sharply and suddenly.  “But,” she added, resuming her icy manner in a moment, “I have no secrets from my husband even in trifles.  When he noticed just now that I looked distressed, it was my painful duty to tell him why I was distressed, and I frankly acknowledge to you, Miss Halcombe, that I have told him.”

I was prepared to hear it, and yet she turned me cold all over when she said those words.

“Let me earnestly entreat you, Madame Fosco—­let me earnestly entreat the Count—­to make some allowances for the sad position in which my sister is placed.  She spoke while she was smarting under the insult and injustice inflicted on her by her husband, and she was not herself when she said those rash words.  May I hope that they will be considerately and generously forgiven?”

“Most assuredly,” said the Count’s quiet voice behind me.  He had stolen on us with his noiseless tread and his book in his hand from the library.

“When Lady Glyde said those hasty words,” he went on, “she did me an injustice which I lament—­and forgive.  Let us never return to the subject, Miss Halcombe; let us all comfortably combine to forget it from this moment.”

“You are very kind,” I said, “you relieve me inexpressibly.”

I tried to continue, but his eyes were on me; his deadly smile that hides everything was set, hard, and unwavering on his broad, smooth face.  My distrust of his unfathomable falseness, my sense of my own degradation in stooping to conciliate his wife and himself, so disturbed and confused me, that the next words failed on my lips, and I stood there in silence.

“I beg you on my knees to say no more, Miss Halcombe—­I am truly shocked that you should have thought it necessary to say so much.”  With that polite speech he took my hand—­oh, how I despise myself! oh, how little comfort there is even in knowing that I submitted to it for Laura’s sake!—­he took my hand and put it to his poisonous lips.  Never did I know all my horror of him till then.  That innocent familiarity turned my blood as if it had been the vilest insult that a man could offer me.  Yet I hid my disgust from him—­I tried to smile—­I, who once mercilessly despised deceit in other women, was as false as the worst of them, as false as the Judas whose lips had touched my hand.