Without another word to her, he walked back into the dining-room. Perhaps twenty good minutes passed before he returned. Claire had meanwhile nerved herself to meet something terrible. She had no idea what her husband's wrath would be like, but she felt that there might almost be death in it. Hollister had hardly begun to address her before she perceived that he did not reveal a single trace of wrath. His eyes were much brighter than usual; he had not a vestige of color; his voice was low and of an increased unfamiliarity, but it did not contain the slightest sign of indignation. She had seated herself on the sofa again, and he now came very close to her, standing while he spoke. He held the letter in his hand, which trembled a little. "You wrote this to Goldwin, and it has been lost by him. Some one else has found it, and sent it to me. The handwriting on the envelope is not his." Claire looked at him in blank amazement. It did not seem to her that he could possibly be the man whom she had thus far known as Herbert Hollister. He appeared radically and utterly changed. She could not understand just where the change lay, or in what it consisted. She was too bewildered to analyze it or in any way draw conclusions from it. She was simply pierced with a pungent sense of its existence. "He lost it," she said. "He wrote me that he had lost it. You are right in thinking that some one else has sent it to you." She wondered what he would now say. She forgot even to feel shame in his presence. She was asking herself what had so completely altered him. Why was he neither angry nor reproachful? The very expression of his features looked strangely unusual. It was almost as if the spirit of some new man had entered into his body. "Whoever has sent this," he soon said, "is your enemy, and wishes you great harm. But thank God I have it!" He crushed the paper in his hand, immediately afterward, and thrust it within his pocket. Claire rose from the sofa. Her hands hung at either side, in a helpless way. Her eyes were still fastened upon his face. "Are you acting a part?" she asked, with a sort of weary desperation. "I realize that I have done a horrible thing. But tell me at once what course you mean to take. If I am to leave your house, and never to be noticed by you again, order me to go, and I will go. The letter shows you that I care nothing for that man. I don't make excuses; I have none to make. But I am not an adulteress even in thought. Remember what I say. My sin, dark as it is, has not that one hideous element. I wanted to desert you--to go abroad--you read the whole story in the letter. You have only to speak the word, and you shall have looked on me for the last time.... It is your silence that tortures me.... Why are you silent? Here I stand before you, without a shadow of right to defend myself, and yet you force from me a certain kind of miserable defense, because you will not either rebuke or denounce me."