She told him. He controlled the riot within him and questioned her further, almost hectoringly, masterfully, and she replied like a woman compelled to obey, yet flinging her answers defiantly. And he went on unrelenting, fighting not her, but the devil that had got possession of her, until she told him all, even the final horror, as far as he could wring confession from her virgin fierceness; for, in the white-hot passion of his anger he had challenged her knowledge of evil almost as directly as the woman had done. “And you believe her?” he cried. “You, Stellamaris, believe that murderous thing of infamy, when you 've known John Risca and his love and his tenderness all your life? You believe it possible--John and Unity? Good God! It 's monstrous! It 's hellish!” He planted himself on the path before her, hands on hips, his sensitive face set, his blue eyes aflame, and looked at her as no man or woman had ever yet looked at Stellamaris. And she met his look, and her eyes, despite the battle her proud soul was fighting, lost their hardness, and new light flashed into them, as though they had changed from agate to diamond. “She loves him, body and soul,” she said. “I ought to have recognized it in London. I did n't know the meaning of things then. I do now.” “Yes, she does love him; she loves him as I love you,”--and, unrealized by him, there came into his voice the vibrating notes of passion that had stirred Stellamaris to the depths at the theatre,--“with every quivering fibre, heart and spirit, body and soul.” He flung both hands before his face,--these were words of madness,--and went on hurriedly: “She loves him as John loves you, as the great souls of the earth can love, without thought of hope, just because they love.” She looked at him, and he looked at her, and they stood, as they had been standing all the time, in the pathway, between the gay borders of flowers; and the sky was blue overhead, and the noonday sun caressed the ivy and lichens on the Georgian front of the Channel House, which basked peacefully on the farther side of the lawn. The kitten had frisked away with feline inconsequence, and Constable sprawled stiffly asleep on the gravel, like a dead dog. “You say you love me like that?” said Stellamaris. “You command love. Unity herself loves you like that,” replied Herold, loyally. “What reason should she have for loving me? She should be jealous of me, as I was of her. And who is she? Who is Unity?” she asked with an imperious little stamp. “I 've been lied to about her for many years. She too lied. Will you explain her? If she's not what that woman said, what is she?” “I 'll tell you,” he said. He spared her nothing. It was not the hour for glossing over unpleasant things. Let her judge out of the fullness of knowledge. At his tale of the torturing--he gave her the details--she shrank back, covering her eyes and uttered a sobbing cry. “It 's too horrible! I can't bear it; I can't believe it.”