She put his hand away with a touch that was a caress, but only said irrelevantly, “And Rhoda Daye might have loved you honestly!” “Ah, that threadbare old story!” He felt as if she had struck him, and the feeling impelled him to ask her why she thought he deserved punishment. “Not that it hurts,” Mr. Ancram added, almost resentfully. She gave him a look of vague surprise, and then lapsed, refusing to make the effort to understand, into the troubled depths of her own thought. “Be a little kind, Judith. I only want a word.” The south wind brought them a sound out of the darkness—the high, faint, long-drawn sound of a cheer from the Maidan. She lifted her head and listened intently, with apprehensive eyes. Then she rose unsteadily from her seat, and, as he gave her his arm in silence, she stood for a moment gathering up her strength, and waiting, it seemed, for the sound to come again. Nothing reached them but the wilder, nearer wail of the jackals in the streets. “I must go home,” she said, in a voice that was quite steady; “I must find my husband and go home.” He would have held her back, but she walked resolutely, if somewhat purposelessly, round the long curve of the verandah, and stood still, looking at the light that streamed out of the ballroom and glistened on the leaves of a range of palms and crotons in pots that made a seclusion there. “Then,” said Ancram, “I am to go on with the forlorn comfort of a guess. I ought to be thankful, I suppose, that you can’t take that from me. Perhaps you would,” he added bitterly, “if you could know how precious it is.” His words seemed to fix her in a half-formed resolve. Her hand slipped out of his arm, and she took a step away from him toward the crotons. Against their dark green leaves he saw, with some alarm, how white her face was. “Listen,” she said: “I think you do not realise it, but I know you are hard and cruel. You ask me if I am not to you what I ought to be to my husband, who is a good man, and who loves me, and trusts you. And, what is worse, this has come up between us at a time when he is threatened and troubled: on the very night when I meant—when I meant”—she stopped to conquer the sob in her throat—“to have asked you to think of something that might be done to help him. Well, but you ask me if I have come to love you, and perhaps in a way you have a right to know; and the truth is better, as you say. And I answer you that I have. I answer you yes, it is true, and I know it will always be true. But from to-night you will remember that every time I look into your face and touch your hand I hurt my own honour and my husband’s, and—and you will not let me see you often.” As Ancram opened his lips to speak, the cheer from the Maidan smote the air again, and this time it seemed nearer. Judith took his arm nervously. “What can they be doing out there?” she exclaimed. “Let us go—I must find my husband—let us go!”