Desmond took a hasty step forward. "How dare you speak so of the straightest man living!" he cried with imperious heat. "You, who have taken advantage of my blindness to deceive me deliberately a second time, on account of a cad who isn't fit to tie your shoe-strings. I've been blind in more than one way lately. But that is over now. I am not likely to repeat the mistake of trusting you implicitly--after this." She cowered under the lash of his just wrath, hiding her face and crying heart-broken tears--the bitterest she had yet shed. In snatching at the shadow it seemed she had lost the substance past recall. "Oh! You are cruel--horrible!" she wailed, with her disarming, pathetic air of a scolded child that made a rough word to her seem cowardly as a blow. "No need to break your heart over it," he said more gently; "and as to cruelty, Evelyn, haven't you abused my faith in your loyalty and dragged my pride in the dust by letting your name be coupled with that man's, though I told you plainly I had good reasons for distrusting and disliking him. I suppose he made a dead set at you while I was away--cowardly brute! But what hits me hardest of all is not your indiscretion; it's your persistent crookedness that poisons everything. It was the same over your bills last year--as I told you then. It's the same now. It's a poor look-out if a man can't trust his own wife; but I suppose you must have lied to me--and to Honor, a dozen times this last week." It had cost him an effort to speak so plainly and at such length; but his wife's uneven breathing was the only answer he received. He came closer and laid an arm round her shoulder. "Evelyn--Ladybird--have you nothing to say to me?" "N--no," she answered in a choked voice, without uncovering her face; "it wouldn't be any use." "Why not? Am I so utterly devoid of understanding?" "No--no. But you brave, strong sort of people can't ever know how hard little things are for--for people like me. It has been so--dull lately. You had--all those men, and--I was lonely. It was nice to have some one--wanting me--some one not miles above my head. But I knew you would be cross if I told you--and--and--" tears choked her utterance--"oh, it's no good talking. You'd never understand." "I understand this much, my dear," he said. "You are done up with the strain of nursing, and badly in need of a change. But we shall soon get away on leave now; and I will see to it that you shall never feel dull or out of it again. Only one thing I insist upon--your intimacy with--that man is at an end. No more riding with him; no more going to his bungalow. From to-day you treat him and his sister as mere acquaintances." She faced him now with terror-stricken eyes. For while he spoke, she had perceived the full extent of her dilemma. "But, Theo--there isn't any need for that," she urged, with a thrill of fear at her own boldness. "They would think it so odd. What excuses could I possibly make?"