He glanced at her sharply and uneasily, and an angry flush passed over his face. "What cursed folly have you got in your head? Is it not enough that this fresh danger has come down upon me--" "Upon _us_, you mean," she interrupted, calmly. "Well, upon _us_, then--but you must get up an injured air, and go on with I don't know what folly? Have done with it; this is no time for womanish nonsense--" "There is so much womanish nonsense about me! There is such reasonableness in your reproach!" Again he looked angrily at her, as he walked up and down the room with a quicker step. He was uneasy, amazed at the turn she had taken, at the straying of her attention from the tremendous fact he had revealed; but, above and beyond all this, he was afraid of her. He shrugged his shoulders impatiently, and said, "Let it drop, let it drop; let me be as unreasonable as you like, and blame me as much as you please, but be truer to yourself, Harriet, to your own helpful nature, than to yield to such fancies now. This is no time for them. We must look things in the face, and act." "It is not I, but you, who refuse to look things in the face, Stewart. This woman, whom I do not know, who has not sought my acquaintance, whose name you have not once mentioned before me, but who makes you the confidant of her flirtations and her appointments--she is young and beautiful, is she not?" "What the devil does it matter whether she is or not?" said Routh, fiercely. "I think you are bent on driving me mad. What has come to you? I don't know you in this new character. I tell you, this woman--" "Mrs. Bembridge," said Harriet, calmly. "Mrs. Bembridge, then, has been the means of my making a discovery which is of tremendous importance, and thus she has unconsciously saved me from an awful danger. "By preventing George Dallas from finding out this fact for a little longer?" "Precisely so. Now I hope you have come to yourself, Harriet, and will talk rationally about this." "I will," she said, rising from her chair and approaching him. She placed her hands upon his shoulders, and looked at him with a steady, searching look. "We will talk this out, Stewart, and I will not shrink from anything there is to be said about it; but you must hear me then, in my turn. We are not like other people, Stewart, and our life is not like theirs. Only ruin can come of any discord or disunion between us." Then she quietly turned away and sat down by the window, with her head a little averted from him, waiting for him to speak. Her voice had been low and thrilling as she said those few words, without a tone of anger in it, and yet the callous man to whom they were addressed heard in them something which sounded like the warning or the menace of doom.