He straightened himself, threw back his shoulders, and said in an uncertain voice: “I hope you don’t take me for a coward.” She made no direct reply, but continued: “Well, then, you thought I loved you, I suppose--” He smiled again, revived his moustache with a slight twist, and gave a hardly perceptible shrug. “You ... ah ... managed to produce the illusion....” “Oh, well, yes: a woman _can_--so easily! That’s what men often forget. You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive prostitute.” “Elizabeth!” he gasped, pale now to the ruddy eyelids. She saw that the word had wounded more than his pride, and that, before realizing the insult to his love, he was shuddering at the offence to his taste. Mistress! Prostitute! Such words were banned. No one reproved coarseness of language in women more than Henry Prest; one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s greatest charms (as he had just told her) had been her way of remaining, “through it all,” so ineffably “the lady.” He looked at her as if a fresh doubt of her sanity had assailed him. “Shall I go on?” she smiled. He bent his head stiffly. “I am still at a loss to imagine for what purpose you made a fool of me.” “Well, then, it was as I say. I wanted money--money for my husband.” He moistened his lips. “For your husband?” “Yes; when he began to be so ill; when he needed comforts, luxury, the opportunity to get away. He saved me, when I was a girl, from untold humiliation and wretchedness. No one else lifted a finger to help me--not one of my own family. I hadn’t a penny or a friend. Mrs. Mant had grown sick of me, and was trying to find an excuse to throw me over. Oh, you don’t know what a girl has to put up with--a girl alone in the world--who depends for her clothes, and her food, and the roof over her head, on the whims of a vain capricious old woman! It was because _he_ knew, because he understood, that he married me.... He took me out of misery into blessedness. He put me up above them all ... he put me beside himself. I didn’t care for anything but that; I didn’t care for the money or the freedom; I cared only for him. I would have followed him into the desert--I would have gone barefoot to be with him. I would have starved, begged, done anything for him--_anything_.” She broke off, her voice lost in a sob. She was no longer aware of Prest’s presence--all her consciousness was absorbed in the vision she had evoked. “It was _he_ who cared--who wanted me to be rich and independent and admired! He wanted to heap everything on me--during the first years I could hardly persuade him to keep enough money for himself.... And then he was taken ill; and as he got worse, and gradually dropped out of affairs, his income grew smaller, and then stopped altogether; and all the while there were new expenses piling up--nurses, doctors, travel; and he grew frightened; frightened not for himself but for me.... And what was I to do? I had to pay for things somehow. For the first year I