She paused, confused by the difficulties in her path, her cheeks hot and flushed. But the heart knew its own innocence. She recovered herself; she came nearer. "--If only--at the same time--I could make you realise how truly--how bitterly--I had felt for any pain you might have suffered--if I could persuade you to look at it all--your husband's conduct and mine--in its true light, and to believe that he cares--he _must_ care--for nothing in the world so much as his home--as you and your happiness!" The nobleness of the speaker, the futility of the speech, were about equally balanced! Candour was impossible, if only for kindness' sake. And the story, so told, was not only unconvincing, it was hardly intelligible even, to Letty. For the two personalities moved in different worlds, and what had seemed to the woman who was all delicate impulse and romance the natural and right course, merely excited in Letty, and not without reason, fresh suspicion and offence. If words had been all, Marcella had gained nothing. But a strange tumult was rising in Letty's breast. There was something in this mingling of self-abasement with an extraordinary moral richness and dignity, in these eyes, these hands that would have so gladly caught and clasped her own, which began almost to intimidate her. She broke out again, so as to hold her own bewilderment at bay: "What right had you to send him away--to plan anything for _my_ husband without my consent? Oh, of course you put it very finely; I daresay you know about all sorts of things _I_ don't know about; I'm not clever, I don't talk politics. But I don't quite see the good of it, if it's only to take husbands away from their wives. All the same, I'm not a hypocrite, and I don't mean to pretend I'm a meek saint. Far from it. I've no doubt that George thinks he's been perfectly justified from the beginning, and that I have brought everything upon myself. Well! I don't care to argue about it. Don't imagine, please, that I have been playing the deserted wife all the time. If people injure me, it's not my way to hold my tongue, and I imagine that, after all, I do understand my own husband, in spite of Lord Maxwell's kind remarks!" She pointed scornfully to Maxwell's letter on the table. "But as soon as I saw that nothing I said mattered to George, and that his whole mind was taken up with your society, why, of course, I took my own measures! There are other men in the world--and one of them happens to amuse me particularly at this moment. It's your doing and George's, you see, if he doesn't like it!" Marcella recoiled in sudden horror, staring at her companion with wide, startled eyes. Letty braved her defiantly, her dry lips drawn into a miserable smile. She stood, looking very small and elegant, beside her writing-table, her hand, blazing with rings, resting lightly upon it, the little, hot withered face alone betraying the nerve tension behind.