“Perhaps you were not aware that he is, practically, under the control of his mother,” he said. “That is to say, he is dependent on her for every penny he spends. It is quite out of the question that he should make money at the bar--by his own profession, that is to say--for two or three years at least. Consequently the cutting off of the allowance made him by Mrs. ---- Roden will mean for him absolute penury.” She was staring at him; staring at him out of two wide, intense brown eyes; with such a helpless bewilderment in her face that she seemed to be quite dazed. She put her hand to her head as he paused with a feeble, uncertain gesture; but she did not speak, and Falconer went on severely: “I conclude that he has not represented these facts to you as they stand. They are facts, nevertheless. You will, therefore, understand that, his allowance withdrawn, he will be entirely without the means of supporting you. You may possibly consider that some shifty means might be found which, by putting him in possession of small sums of money, would enable him for a time to defy his mother. Let me point out to you something of what such a course would involve. Julian Roden is a young man with a good position in society--I mean he is accustomed to be made much of by men and women who are his equals; he has chances and opportunities of which he intends, no doubt, to avail himself. All this, in taking such a step, he would throw away for ever. Social intercourse, future career, would go with his income at his mother’s word. Now, I will ask you only how long you could hope to depend on him in such circumstances; how long it would be before his only feeling for the woman whom he had allowed to drag him down and to destroy all his hopes in life would degenerate into sheer repugnance; and for how long he would care to keep her?” He paused, and after a moment’s dead silence Clemence spoke in a weak, eager, almost desperate voice: “There must be some mistake! It--it can’t be--the same!” The words seemed to Falconer a mere miserable subterfuge, and he answered very sternly: “There is not the faintest possibility of mistake. Julian Roden has owned the whole affair to his mother, who taxed him with it on her discovery----” “Oh, wait a minute! Wait a minute!” There was a ring of such intolerable pain, such shame and anguish, in the voice, that Falconer’s attention, heavy and prejudiced as it was, was arrested by it. Dimly and uncertainly, and for the first time, the girl before him appeared to him, not simply as a representative of a degraded sisterhood, but as a woman. He looked at her for a moment, as she stood with her face buried in her hands, quivering from head to foot, with a severe kind of pity.