"I never questioned it," she said, sharply; "you know, Richard, I never questioned your decision!" There was a pause. The memories of both husband and wife were busy with the past, with an offer which had been made to them by Richard Rebell's kinswoman, the offer of a home in England, and of a chance, or so the wife had thought at the time, of ultimate rehabilitation for one whom many even then thought completely innocent of the charge brought against him. Adela Rebell was a woman of high honesty, and so, "That is not quite true," she said reluctantly, "I _did_ question your decision in my heart, and I see now that you were right. And yet perhaps, my dear, if we had been there----?" Richard Rebell got up. He went and deliberately closed the window, making a temporary prisoner of the little girl: then he came back, and answered, very composedly, the meaning of the half-question which his wife's shrinking delicacy had prevented her putting into words. "Our being there, Adela, would not have made the slightest difference," he gave her a peculiar, not unkindly look, "for as a matter of fact I was then aware of what you apparently only began to suspect long after; and I think that you will admit that the state of things would have made our position at Chancton intolerable. We should very naturally have been expected to shut our eyes--to pander----" "Yes--yes indeed!" his wife shrank back. "But you never told me this before----Why did you not tell me at the time?" "My dear," he answered, very quietly, "that is not the sort of thing a man cares to tell, even his wife, when the heroine of the tale is his own cousin. And Barbara, as you have reminded me to-day, had behaved, and was behaving, very generously to us both." "But if--if you felt like that, why----" Mrs. Rebell looked up imploringly; she knew what this conversation meant in pain and retrospective anguish to them both. But again Richard Rebell answered, very patiently, his wife's unspoken question, "Well, I admit that I am perhaps illogical. But what happened two years ago, I mean the birth of Barbara's child--has made a difference to my feeling. I don't think"--he spoke questioningly as if to himself, "I hope to God I don't feel as I do owing to any ignoble disappointment?" "No, no, indeed not!" There was an accent of eager protest in Adela Rebell's voice: "Besides, she wrote and said--she has said again and again--that it will make no difference." "In any case," he spoke rather coldly, "Barbara Sampiero is certain to outlive me, and I do not think anything would make her unjust to our girl. But to return to what I was saying, and then, if you do not mind, Adela, we will not refer to the subject again----The birth of the child, I say, has altered my feeling, much as it seems to have done, from what I gather from Daman, that of the rest of the world." "I always so disliked Mr. Daman," his wife said irrelevantly.