She does not answer for a moment, but she has his hand still clasped close in her own, while her face grows deathly white, and there is a startled, stricken look in her grey eyes that cuts him to the heart. “It is _quite_ true, Zai. For a little while I _did_ forget you. Another woman’s face came between us, and for the life of me I _couldn’t_ shake off its power over me, though I tried. Upon my soul I _tried_!” He pauses, breathless, and a pallor creeps over his face--a face as handsome as Apollo’s, in spite of suffering. “Well, Zai, I saw her, not more than half-a-dozen times, perhaps, but each time she seemed to draw me closer and closer to her, and further--from--you--till the--_last time_.” Zai listens to it all--to this confession of sin and wrong--her gaze never swerving from his face, and her heart full to bursting. “Did you _kiss_ her, Delaval?” she whispers at last in a faint, scared voice, and on the impulse of the moment she puts up her little fingers to stop her ears, in dread of his saying “Yes.” Then she drops them desolately. “No! thank God I never did!” he says quite heartily, and Zai breathes more freely. And, the tension gone, she lays her head down on his arm and cries like a child, but the tears are more of relief than of bitterness, and the world does not look half as dreary to her as it did a few minutes ago. “No! I thank God, that you have nothing to forgive on that score, though I am bound to say that both the spirit was willing and the flesh was weak; but a lucky fate prevented it. No! it was only my _heart_, Zai! Pshaw! fancy my calling it my _heart_. It was only my senses, Zai!” She ponders a moment. It is dreadful to know that he has been caring for another woman; but still it is a great comfort--a very, very great comfort--to know that he has not _kissed_ her. So she lifts up her face with a smile, half-piteous, half-glad, on her mouth, and her arm steals round his neck. Poor fellow, he looks so thin and white and haggard, she could not be angry with him for the world. “Well, my little one?” he says, but he knows quite well that she loves him so much she will never be hard on him, and, after all, it was only a venial sin, he thinks, with the self-indulgent complacency so common to the style of man he is. “I forgive you!” she whispers between fond fervent kisses on his lips, “for you know, darling, that ‘to err is human.’” “Yes! my own, own love! And ‘to forgive--divine!’” * * * * * But there is one secret yet that Lord Delaval keeps religiously from his wife’s innocent ears. It is, that the woman who tempted him was--_Gabrielle_! THE END. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Daughters of Belgravia; vol 3 of 3, by Mrs. Alexander Fraser