The voice was familiar yet strange. There was in it the indefinable hardening and ageing which seemed to Boyson to have affected the whole personality. What had happened to her? As he looked at her in the dim light there rushed upon them both the memory of those three weeks by the seaside years before, when he had fallen in love with her, and she had first trifled with, and then repulsed him. "I wished to ask you a question, in the name of our old friendship; and because I have also become a friend--as you know--of your husband." He felt, rather than saw, the start of anger in the woman beside him. "Captain Boyson! I cannot defend myself, but I would ask you to recognize ordinary courtesies. I have now no husband." "Of your husband," he repeated, without hesitation, yet gently. "By the law of England at least, which you accepted, and under which you became a British subject, you are still the wife of Roger Barnes, and he has done nothing whatever to forfeit his right to your wifely care. It is indeed of him and of his present state that I beg to be allowed to speak to you." He heard a little laugh beside him--unsteady and hysterical. "You beg for what you have already taken. I repeat, I am at your mercy. An American subject, Captain Boyson, knows nothing of the law of England. I have recovered my American citizenship, and the law of my country has freed me from a degrading and disastrous marriage!" "While Roger remains bound? Incapable, at the age of thirty, of marrying again, unless he renounces his country--permanently debarred from home and children!" His pulse ran quick. It was a strange adventure, this, to which he had committed himself! "I have nothing to do with English law, nothing whatever! It is unjust, monstrous. But that was no reason why I, too, should suffer!" "No reason for patience? No reason for pity?" said the man's voice, betraying emotion at last. "Mrs. Barnes, what do you know of Roger's present state?" "I have no need to know anything." "It matters nothing to you? Nothing to you that he has lost health, and character, and happiness, his child, his home, everything, owing to your action?" "Captain Boyson!" she cried, her composure giving way, "this is intolerable, outrageous! It is humiliating that you should even expect me to argue with you. Yet," she bit her lip, angry with the agitation that would assail her, "for the sake of our friendship to which you appeal, I would rather not be angry. What you say is monstrous!" her voice shook. "In the first place, I freed myself from a man who married me for money." "One moment! Do you forget that from the day you left him Roger has never touched a farthing of your money? That he returned everything to you?" "I had nothing to do with that; it was his own folly." "Yes, but it throws light upon his character. Would a mere fortune-hunter have done it? No, Mrs. Barnes!--that view of Roger does not really convince you, you do not really believe it."