BEATRICE. To know what you're going to do. Are you going to divorce me? We're in your power. Don't divorce me--Doctor and patient--you must know--it ruins him. He'll lose everything. He'd be disqualified, and he hasn't a penny without his work. STRANGWAY. Why should I spare him? BEATRICE. Michael; I came to beg. It's hard. STRANGWAY. No; don't beg! I can't stand it. [She shakes her head.] BEATRICE. [Recovering her pride] What are you going to do, then? Keep us apart by the threat of a divorce? Starve us and prison us? Cage me up here with you? I'm not brute enough to ruin him. STRANGWAY. Heaven! BEATRICE. I never really stopped loving him. I never--loved you, Michael. STRANGWAY. [Stunned] Is that true? [BEATRICE bends her head] Never loved me? Not--that night--on the river--not----? BEATRICE. [Under her breath] No. STRANGWAY. Were you lying to me, then? Kissing me, and--hating me? BEATRICE. One doesn't hate men like you; but it wasn't love. STRANGWAY. Why did you tell me it was? BEATRICE. Yes. That was the worst thing I've ever done. STRANGWAY. Do you think I would have married you? I would have burned first! I never dreamed you didn't. I swear it! BEATRICE. [Very low] Forget it! STRANGWAY. Did he try to get you away from me? [BEATRICE gives him a swift look] Tell me the truth! BEATRICE. No. It was--I--alone. But--he loves me. STRANGWAY. One does not easily know love, it seems. [But her smile, faint, mysterious, pitying, is enough, and he turns away from her.] BEATRICE. It was cruel to come, I know. For me, too. But I couldn't write. I had to know. STRANGWAY. Never loved me? Never loved me? That night at Tregaron? [At the look on her face] You might have told me before you went away! Why keep me all these---- BEATRICE. I meant to forget him again. I did mean to. I thought I could get back to what I was, when I married you; but, you see, what a girl can do, a woman that's been married--can't. STRANGWAY. Then it was I--my kisses that----! [He laughs] How did you stand them? [His eyes dart at her face] Imagination helped you, perhaps! BEATRICE. Michael, don't, don't! And--oh! don't make a public thing of it! You needn't be afraid I shall have too good a time! [He stays quite still and silent, and that which is writhing in him makes his face so strange that BEATRICE stands aghast. At last she goes stumbling on in speech] If ever you want to marry some one else--then, of course--that's only fair, ruin or not. But till then--till then----He's leaving Durford, going to Brighton. No one need know. And you--this isn't the only parish in the world. STRANGWAY. [Quietly] You ask me to help you live in secret with another man? BEATRICE. I ask for mercy. STRANGWAY. [As to himself] What am I to do? BEATRICE. What you feel in the bottom of your heart. STRANGWAY. You ask me to help you live in sin?