A profligate! The horrible word wounded her like the stroke of a knife. In a moment this innocent girl, who until now had only known the existence of “profligacy” as an unspeakable noun substantive hidden away somewhere in the close columns of unexpurgated dictionaries, felt the veil rudely torn from the purity of her mind; and was told that her husband--the other part of herself, united to her by the solemn service of the Church--was the obnoxious thing which until this hour no one had ever dared to name in her presence. The generosity she had believed in was a sham. The noble nature which had commanded her regard and esteem, even when it could not win her love, had never existed out of her own imagination. She had been wronged, betrayed, humiliated; while in her schoolgirl simplicity she had been lamenting her unworthiness of a devoted husband’s love. She had been bought for money like a slave in some Oriental market-place, when she had imagined herself a free sacrifice offered as the recompense of a sacred debt. She did not speak; but looking at her face Harcourt Lowther saw that his words had gone home. The breach between husband and wife yawned wide enough now. The undermining of the ground had been slow, laborious work, but the result repaid this social engineer for all his trouble. With what a crash the earth fell in when it was time for the convulsion! So some huge mass of Kentish chalk, which sappers and miners have been manipulating for a month or so, and at which a crowd of tired spectators have been straining hopelessly for two hours at a stretch, breaks away all at once from the bosom of the cliff with a thunderous noise, and crumbles into powder. But Mr. Lowther had not finished yet. “I thought I could win you back to your husband, Maude, and restore him to you a better man,” he said; “but I soon discovered how futile such a hope was. I have been by his side in scenes that were horribly repugnant to my own nature, in order that I might hold him back from the verge of deeper gulfs than those into which he had already fallen. Within the last few months I have known that he kept a secret from me, and I knew that it must be a disgraceful one. Only a few days ago it came to my knowledge that he had lately furnished a house somewhere in the suburbs. This gave me a clue to those mysterious absences, those journeys on business a little way out of town, about which your husband had been so reticent. Men of Francis Tredethlyn’s calibre do not furnish houses from benevolent motives. I had no means of knowing where the house was,--how little could I imagine that it was in this neighbourhood, or that accident would lead our footsteps to its very threshold! Mrs. Tredethlyn, you shall not wring another word from me. I am sorry that you have tempted me to tell you so much,” exclaimed Mr. Harcourt, who had said all he wanted to say. It was a long time before Maude answered him; and then she said, very slowly, and with a painful effort--