"It was her work, not mine. She'd got a dim sense of what she owed me, I suppose, or else a fear of something. Yet, looking back, I often wondered she troubled to tell me the truth, for she knew well enough I was much too inexperienced and ignorant to have found it out. She might have lied. Perhaps it was a case where a lie would have been best--if a lie's ever best. Anyway it's to her credit, I suppose, that she told me. Not that she would have done so if she'd known how I should take it. She reminded me of her nest-egg and how I'd asked her how she came by it, and how she'd said an uncle left it to her under his will. 'That's not true,' she said to me. 'And I don't want to begin our married life with a secret between us, specially as it happens to be such a trifle. I dare say some fools would pull a long face,' she said, 'but you ain't that sort, else you'd never have fallen in love with me.' Then she told me that for two years she'd been the mistress of a gentleman at Bristol--a rich, educated man in business there. He'd kept her till he was going to be married, and they parted very good friends and he gave her a thousand pounds. He'd used her very well indeed and never talked any nonsense about marrying her, or anything like that. It was just a bargain, and he had what he wanted and so had she. Then she bent across the carriage and put her arms round my neck and kissed me. But she kissed a stone. I kept my head. I didn't go mad. I didn't curse or let on. "I put her arms off me and bade her sit down and let me think; and all the passion I felt against her kept inside me. I was man enough for that. She looked a pretty thing that day. In pink she was, and if ever a man could swear he looked at a virgin, he might have sworn it afore her grey eyes. "I told her it was all up; and she kept her nerve too. A funny sort of scene for any onlooker, to watch a newly-married man and woman starting on their honeymoon and lost to all but a future bargain. Guard looked in and had a laugh sometimes when the train stopped, and we ruled our faces and grinned back at him. "She began by trying hard to change me. She poured out a flood of reasons; she used her quick brains as she'd never used them afore. But she kept as keen and cool as a dealer to market, and when she found I wasn't going on with it, she bided still a bit and then asked me what I was going to do. "That I couldn't tell her for the minute. 'Us'll begin at the beginning,' I said, 'and have every step clear. You've got my name now, and you're my wife in the law, and you've got your rights. And I shan't come between you and them. But my love for you is dead. I don't hate you, because, I suppose, women are mostly built like you and I won't waste my strength hating you. You've gone. You're less to me now than the trees passing the window. You'll live your life and I'll live mine,' I said to her; 'but you're outside mine in future and I'm outside yours.'