She considered a minute while pretending to feel for it, and made up her mind that it would be best to give it to him, as there was nothing in it which was likely to have any meaning for him. So she handed him the letter carelessly, and affected to be gazing admiringly on the landscape while he read it. But Harry got on to the right track at once. “This Cooke--is he the Aubrey Cook Lilian talks about?” “Yes; he was acting at the Piccadilly when I was there.” “He is a man in the habit of making love to every woman he meets?” “I don’t know, I am sure. I did not know him well, and you see, as Miss Taylor says, I never liked him.” There was a pause, but he was not satisfied. “He must be a low, vicious, unprincipled fellow!” said he suddenly, keeping his eyes fixed steadily on his wife. Annie winced. “I suppose it is men like him who get the stage such a bad name?” he went on. Still she said nothing, but leaned over the low battlemented wall of the tower, and kept her eyes steadily fixed on the smoke-hung town in the distance. “I hope there will be no such hounds in the theater you are going to, Annie. If I thought you were going back to a place contaminated by the presence of such an infamous scoundrel, I would not let you go!” Annie turned her head very quietly. “What has he done?” said she. “Done! Haven’t you read that letter? Haven’t you heard that he is engaged to one woman while he is hardly ever away from another--one of the vilest of her sex? Perhaps you think nothing of that?” “Well, you see,” said Annie very slowly, looking full into his angry face, “I have known so many men do worse things than that.” After a minute’s pause, which her husband did not attempt to fill, she went on, “I have known married men who neglected, insulted, and even struck their wives within the very first months of marriage, who gave what little attention they had to spare for anything so contemptible as a woman to the lowest of the sex--men who crushed the beauty out of their young wives by brutal carelessness and cruelty, and who thought that years of abandonment, and almost every wrong a man can do a woman, were amply atoned for by a burst of capricious affection--affection so selfish that it never lost an opportunity of wounding the object of it.” Harry listened to this outburst without an interruption. His head sunk and his chest heaved as she grew more excited; but when she had finished, he raised his blue eyes to her face, and asked very quietly: “How have I wounded you?” Annie was not quite prepared for this. She answered, after a little hesitation: “By insulting the profession to which I belong--which has given me all the happiness I have known since my marriage with you.”