She flushed deeper and deeper, and was burning red when she replied in a fainter voice, ‘I do not think that likely, either.’ ‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said Harthouse, after a short silence, ‘may there be a better confidence between yourself and me? Tom has borrowed a considerable sum of you?’ ‘You will understand, Mr. Harthouse,’ she returned, after some indecision: she had been more or less uncertain, and troubled throughout the conversation, and yet had in the main preserved her self-contained manner; ‘you will understand that if I tell you what you press to know, it is not by way of complaint or regret. I would never complain of anything, and what I have done I do not in the least regret.’ ‘So spirited, too!’ thought James Harthouse. ‘When I married, I found that my brother was even at that time heavily in debt. Heavily for him, I mean. Heavily enough to oblige me to sell some trinkets. They were no sacrifice. I sold them very willingly. I attached no value to them. They were quite worthless to me.’ Either she saw in his face that he knew, or she only feared in her conscience that he knew, that she spoke of some of her husband’s gifts. She stopped, and reddened again. If he had not known it before, he would have known it then, though he had been a much duller man than he was. ‘Since then, I have given my brother, at various times, what money I could spare: in short, what money I have had. Confiding in you at all, on the faith of the interest you profess for him, I will not do so by halves. Since you have been in the habit of visiting here, he has wanted in one sum as much as a hundred pounds. I have not been able to give it to him. I have felt uneasy for the consequences of his being so involved, but I have kept these secrets until now, when I trust them to your honour. I have held no confidence with any one, because—you anticipated my reason just now.’ She abruptly broke off. He was a ready man, and he saw, and seized, an opportunity here of presenting her own image to her, slightly disguised as her brother.