At any other time and in any other place this meeting must have filled him with horror of a different kind. His soul might have been swept by pain and anger to find Nancy Sylvester, whom his imagination had placed high and inaccessible as the very stars, whose memory had acted as a beacon to him, casting a pure white light to guide him through the quagmire of many a vile temptation, reduced to this state of--as he judged it--evil splendour. Just now, however, the consciousness of his own infamous position blotted out all other thought. He staggered forward, and fell on his knees before her. “Nan! Nan!” he cried in a strangled voice, “I did not know. I did not dream....” It was enough to confirm the very worst of the fears that were assailing her, to afford her that explanation of his presence against which she had been desperately struggling in defiance of the overwhelming evidences. She stood before him, a woman of little more than average height and of an almost sapling grace, yet invested with something proud and regal and aloof that did not desert her even now in this terrible situation at once of peril and of cruellest disillusion. She was dressed, as it chanced, entirely in white, and all white she stood before him save where the folds of the blue scarf with which she had been muffled still hung about her neck and bosom. No whiter than her oval face was her gown of shimmering ivory satin. About her long-shaped eyes, that could by turns be provocative, mocking, and caressing in their glances, dark stains of suffering were growing manifest, whilst in their blue-green depths there was nothing but stark horror. She put a delicate, tapering hand to her brow, brushing thence the modish tendrils of her chestnut hair, and twice she attempted to speak before words would come from her stiff lips. “You did not know!” Pain rendered harsh and rasping the voice whose natural music had seduced whole multitudes, and the sound of it was a sword of sharpness to that kneeling, distracted man. “It is, then, as I thought. You have done this thing at the hiring of another. You are so fallen that you play the hired bully. And you are Randal Holles!” A groan, a wild gesture of despair were the outward signs of his torment. On his knees he dragged himself nearer, to her very feet. “Nan, Nan, don’t judge until you have heard, until....” But she interrupted him. His very abjectness was in itself an eloquent admission of the worst. “Heard? Have you not told me all? You did not know. You did not know that it was I whom you were carrying off. Do you think I cannot guess who is the master-villain that employs you for his jackal? And you did not know it was I--that it was one who loved you once, when you were clean and honest....” “Nan! Nan! O God!”