She was exasperated to the highest pitch by his perfect coolness, and tears of rage stood in her eyes. He had preserved an imperturbable composure; neither her passion nor her sarcasm moved him. Desperately she caught at the one hope that remained. She came towards him suddenly, dropped upon her knees by his side, and hid her face, covered with her hands, on his arm, while he sat astonished and confused. "Laurence!" she sobbed, "listen to me. Do you not know that all the wicked things I say are said because I am miserable; because the love of you and the loss of you have turned me into something that I dread to think of and to look into? Have some compassion on me! I wronged you, I know; but can you not forgive me? Do you think the prize I won brought me any peace? Be merciful to a woman's vanity and weakness. Am I the only woman who is weak and vain? You did love me once; you could love me now, if you would only put aside your pride, if you would only try to be merciful to the errors which I have so bitterly repented. Laurence, this woman, who has been the cause of all--whose wrongs are upon her own head--what can she ever be to you? You know she is, according to your own account, _too good_ to be tempted from her duty, while I--I am free; there is no barrier between us now--and I love you." She raised her drooping head, she let her hands fall, and she looked at him. The time had been when such a look would have brought Laurence Alsager to her feet; but now, he had said truly, "that time was dead and buried." He rose with an air of stern determination. She had risen from her knees, and had resumed her chair She was deadly pale; her eyes were wild and haggard; and she caught her breath with a sort of gasping sob, which threatened a burst of hysterical passion. Laurence spoke low and sadly: "When you come to think over what you have just said, you will be angry with yourself for having uttered, and with me for having heard, such words. I will not dwell upon them, nor will I voluntarily remember them. If you had never caused me more than the pang which your first faithlessness to myself made me suffer, I might indeed have pardoned it, for the sake of the old glamour, and made myself miserable by marrying a woman whom I could not respect, because I had once loved her. But that the woman who jilted me for Percy Hammond's rupees, then betrayed Hammond for Sir Charles Mitford, and would now discard Mitford for me--by the way, I am a much richer man than Hammond was; barring the widowhood, your speculation has been defective--should dream, in the wildest paroxysms of a woman's unreasonableness, that I could be cajoled, or bribed, through my interest in another, to put her in my honoured mother's place, is beyond my comprehension." She looked at him, still with wild haggard eyes, and still she sobbed, but shed no tears.