“Forget you? I would give my soul if I could,” simply. But there was nothing in his bearing to comfort her. “You don’t love me--now?” She persisted. “No, not now. It will hurt you very little, as you have Wray.” There was no taunt in his voice, only misery and conviction. She sat, dumb and quivering. “If you ever loved me, go!” he cried. “Can’t you see that any hour you may be tracked?” Like lightning she was on her feet, facing him. Her eyes were splendid in the dusk, her beauty appalling as she spoke. “If I ever loved you!” she cried. “I, who loved you as a nun adores the cross; who was wicked, heartless, altogether evil, till you made me see that truth and goodness were things to live and die for! It was for your sake I fought for my mother. I hated her till I knew you; now I pity her with all my heart. “Miles, if you listen now, I can tell you what would make even you pitiful. I can show you what a lying truth yesterday was--only hear me.” “I would not believe you,” he cried wretchedly. “I should go home and know it was only another act in the play; that you----” With a gesture she stopped him; she had raised both her hands with a movement that was magnificent. She spoke solemnly, as a priest who calls down the wrath of God. “Then it is on your head,” she said, and he could but just hear her. “The sin, the crime, all that will come if you send me away. If I go from you it will be to become all you think me; neither truth nor honor nor pity will ever spring in me again. You will hear of me, and know that it was you who made me that thing that I shall be; the memory of it shall haunt you in life; it will cry out against you at the judgment day. “As for my mother”--superb, powerful, she held him with her eyes--“I will bring that crime home--but not to my mother. I would have told you all the truth to-day, but you sealed my lips. I could tell you of a thing so wicked that even I could not see it done--but why should I warn you, when you think I am a liar?” “My God, Ismay! What are you saying?” A thought so awful in his mind that he caught her by the arm till her flesh was bruised. “Let me go!” She wrenched herself free. “God--I believed in no God till I knew you. Now, I believe, and as He hears me, I swear the day will come when for this day’s work you could kill yourself. No, don’t answer; don’t speak!” contemptuously. “By and by you will know that once I was true, and by then I shall be a thing to shudder at, with death on my hands----” Her voice broke wildly. “But the guilt of it will be on you. I wash my hands of it. Take your ring. I was never fit to wear it. But when I am dead and in hell, you can remember that you put me there.” “Tell me what you mean!” authoritatively. “I came to tell you--and you would not hear me. Now it is too late.” All her excitement was gone, her words were as quick and irrevocable as Fate.