Old Fareham caught her hands in his; he led her to her seat again, and put her in it, uttering all the time sounds that were half soothing, half blaspheming. He stood by her, patting her on the shoulder, his old eyebrows contracted, his lips quivering under their heavy grey moustache. He was more agitated now than she was. The telling of her secret seemed to have delivered her soul. When he had recovered himself he asked a hundred questions, to all which she answered calmly enough. The room, with its look of disorder--the litter of last night, the fresh morning sunshine streaming in disregarded, emphasising the squalor of the ashes in the grate--surrounded with a fitting background the strange discussion between these two--the old man fatigued with his night journey, the woman pale as a ghost, with eyes incapable of sleep. She told him everything, forestalling his half-said protest that it must be another Lycett-Landon with the fact of her personal encounter with her husband, forgetting nothing. The facts of the case had by this time paled of their first importance to her eyes, while they were everything to his. They no longer agitated her; while that which convulsed her very soul seemed to him of but little importance. "I cannot tell the children. How am I to tell the children?" He became weary of this refrain. "We can think of the children later. In the meantime, this other is the important question. He has brought himself within the range of the law; you can punish him." "Punish him?" she said, with a strange smile--"punish him?" "Yes; you may forgive if you please, but I can't forgive. He deserves to be punished, and he shall be punished--and the woman----" "He said she was as innocent--as I am." "He said! he is a famous authority. One knows what kind of creature----" "I have seen her," said Queen Eleanor, with a sigh, "poor child. He said nothing but the truth; she is not in fault. She is the one who is most injured. I would save her if I could." "Save her! You would let this sweet establishment go on," he said, with fine sarcasm, "and not disturb them?" "Yes," she said. "It may be wrong, but I think I would if I could." "You are mad!" cried the old man. "You have lost all your good sense, and your feeling too. What, your own husband! you would let him go on living in sin--happy----" She stopped him with a curious kind of authority--a look before which he paused in spite of himself. "Happy!" she said; "I suppose so; at fifty, after living honestly all these years!" He stopped and shook his grey head. "I have known such a thing before. It seems as if they must break out--as if common life and duty became insupportable. I have known such a case once before."