“I cannot, and will not, enter into the details of Francis Tredethlyn’s life for the last twelve months. No, Maude, not even your entreaties shall wring from me more than I have a right to tell, or you to hear. And if I spoke the plainest words that ever sullied a woman’s ear, I should only be talking a strange language which would convey no meaning to your innocent mind. There are places in London whose names you have never heard in your life--places whose very existence might never be known to honest people, if men did not write about them in the newspapers; and amongst the _habitués_ of those places your husband has been conspicuous since the first week of his return from the village where you and he spent your honeymoon. There are dinners given, up at that hotel yonder, to women whose costume is an extravagant copy of yours, but who in everything except their dress differ from you as entirely as darkness differs from light; and Francis Tredethlyn has been foremost amongst the dinner-givers ever since he has had a fortune to squander. So long as he was amused by open follies and dissipations I cherished a lingering hope that custom would bring weariness, and that the very monotony of these poisonous pleasures would render them their own antidote. I made excuses for the man who had so newly succeeded to a fortune large enough to intoxicate a weak brain; and I fancied when the novelty of his wealth had ceased to bewilder him, he would awake to a bitter sense of the degrading path in which he was treading. I thought this, Maude, and I believed also that your loveliness, your purity, rendered all the more obvious by contrast with the people among whom he wasted his life, must lure him back to your side. How could I think otherwise than this?--_I_, who had loved and lost you!” It never occurred to Mrs. Tredethlyn that these were the very last words that Harcourt Lowther should have spoken to her, at this moment above all other moments. It seemed as if she scarcely heard this allusion to the past, any more than she had heard her old lover’s frequent utterance of her Christian name. “I think my husband loved me--once,” she murmured in a low sorrowful voice. “He was so noble in his conduct--so generous to my father.” “My poor girl,” exclaimed Harcourt, with supreme compassion, “how should _you_ know the difference between a good man’s generosity and a profligate’s lavish bid for the fair young bride who happens to be the fancy of a moment? There are men who will give as exaggerated a price for a picture as ever Francis Tredethlyn offered when he won you for his wife; but you would scarcely call a man ‘generous’ because he bid extravagantly for a Raffaelle or a Murillo at Christie’s. There is no creature in this world so selfish as a profligate.” Maude turned sick and cold to the very heart as Mr. Lowther said this.