"That is rather a wide accusation," said the Major, calmly. He knew perfectly what was coming, and that he should require all his patience--all that sweetness of temper which had been his distinction through life--in order to leaven the widow's wrath against the absent. "Perhaps, you won't think it too much trouble to explain the exact nature of my offence?" Mrs. Tregonell told him Lady Cumberbridge's story. "Did you, or did you not, know this last October?" she asked. "I had heard something about it when I was in London two years before." "And you did not consider it your duty to tell me?" "Certainly not. I told you at the time, when I came back from town, that your young protégé's life had been a trifle wild. Miss Bridgeman remembered the fact, and spoke of it the night Hamleigh came to Mount Royal. When I saw how matters were going with Belle and Hamleigh, I made it my business to question him, considering myself Belle's next friend; and he assured me, as between man and man, that the affair with Stella Mayne was over--that he had broken with her formally and finally. From first to last I believe he acted wonderfully well in the business." "Acted well!--acted well, to be the avowed lover of such a woman!--to advertise his devotion to her--associate his name with hers irrevocably--for you know that the world never forgets these alliances--and then to come to Mount Royal, and practise upon our provincial ignorance, and offer his battered life to my niece! Was that well?" "You could hardly wish him to have told your niece the whole story. Besides, it is a thing of the past. No man can go through life with the burden of his youthful follies hanging round his neck, and strangling him." "The past is as much a part of a man's life as the present. I want my niece's husband to be a man of an unstained past." "Then you will have to wait a long time for him. My dear Mrs. Tregonell, pray be reasonable, just commonly reasonable! There is not a family in England into which Angus Hamleigh would not be received with open arms, if he offered himself as a suitor. Why should you draw a hard-and-fast line, sacrifice Belle's happiness to a chimerical idea of manly virtue? You can't have King Arthur for your niece's husband, and if you could, perhaps you wouldn't care about him. Why not be content with Lancelot, who has sinned, and is sorry for his sin; and of whom may be spoken praise almost as noble as those famous words Sir Bohort spoke over his friend's dead body." "I shall not sacrifice Belle's happiness. If she were my daughter I should take upon myself to judge for her, and while I lived she should never see Angus Hamleigh's face again. But she is my sister's child, and I shall give her the liberty of judgment." "You don't mean that you will tell her this story?" "Most decidedly."