“You are right,” he answered decisively; “I am _not_ the original Reginald Fairfax; I am an older and wiser, if not better man. My illusions have been dispelled, my susceptibilities blunted, my eyes rudely opened. I know _you_ to be an extraordinary combination of caprice, obstinacy, and inconsistency.” He broke off, and looked at her with a mixture of contempt and indignation; he dared not trust to speech. “I don’t know what you mean; I have abased myself sufficiently, my conscience tells me,” she replied, with quivering lips. “You thrust me aside with scorn, and even add that you will take my child from me.” Here her grief overcame all considerations, and covering her face with her hands she burst into tears. There was a very dark look on her husband’s face as he surveyed her for some moments in silence; he was extremely angry with her; he thought she had befooled him again, played with his feelings as a cat with a mouse. He was wounded to the heart and bitterly disappointed. Each day he had been lingering on in hopes of one word of regret. With even _one_ he would have been satisfied. To tell him she thought the same as ever was too much; it was inconceivable, it was impossible, it was maddening. “She must be a born actress,” he thought as he stood opposite her. “This grief is all feigned.” Still, as he watched the tears trickling through her fingers he relented somewhat. In the first place he could not endure to see any woman crying, much less Alice. She little knew what a powerful weapon she was using against him. As he looked at her slight figure, heaving with half-suppressed sobs, his conscience smote him. He _was_ hard, cruel, and tyrannical. After all she was only a girl, and a very frail, delicate one too. Was this the way to guard her as the apple of his eye, to restore her to health, to study every wish?--scarcely. “Alice,” he said, gently removing her hands, “don’t cry like this; I can’t bear to see you.” “Then, why do you make me cry?” she sobbed plaintively. “I won’t do it again,” offering her his handkerchief; her own had gone home in Geoffrey’s charge, filled with moss and roots. “I never saw you cry before, and I hope I never shall again.” “Then you won’t take Maurice from me,” she pleaded, raising her tear-stained face to his, with a look of passionate supplication. “No, but you will lend him to me sometimes.” “Ye-es,” very dubiously; “but you can always come here to see him.” “Pardon me, I never intend coming here again. Once I leave I shall never return.” “Never return!” The words seemed to echo and vibrate through the dim leafy silence of the surrounding trees. “Oh, Reginald!” “Now, Alice, you are never going to be so foolish as to cry for _that_,” he asked roughly. Sobs. What was he to do with her? “Alice, why are you crying? You promised me that you would not.” They were now walking home; but Alice’s supply of tears seemed unlimited. This was a new and alarming experience.