"You are playing a game to win. I don't accuse you of sordid motives. You want to win." "Perhaps I do." "Have you asked yourself the simple question, whether it is possible for me to commit such a crime, and then to confess?" "I have to win this game, Lady Woodroffe. I think I have won it." "It is not won yet. And believe me, sir, it will not be won unless I choose." "We can place you in a very awkward position, anyhow." "Mr. Richard Woodroffe, you came here to make a final appeal to me; it is my turn to make a final appeal to you. I am a woman, as perhaps you know, of very considerable importance in the world. Such a charge as you bring against me would not only crush me, if it were proved, but it would dislocate or ruin a great many associations and institutions of which I am the very soul. Thousands of orphans, working girls, Magdalens, and sinners, would lose their best friend. I am their best friend; my tongue and my pen keep up the stream which flows in to their relief. Is it not possible for that woman to think of these things? Or, there is the boy. He is partly, I suppose, what he is by education, partly by his nature; take away from him his position as a gentleman of rank and family, send him out disgraced to make his own way in the world, and he will sink like lead. You call him your half-brother. Well, Mr. Woodroffe, he is not a young man of many virtues; in fact, he has many vices." "That I can well believe." "If he has seven devils now, after this disclosure he will have seventy-seven devils." "That also I can well believe. But, of course, I do not think about him." "Then, Mr. Woodroffe, can you not persuade that poor woman to go home, to be content with what she has seen and you have proved?" "No, I cannot." "Can you not remind her that she sold the child on the condition that she would never trouble about him, or seek to know where he might be living?" "No, I cannot. She has seen her son; she knows who he is; she wants your acknowledgment. Give her that, and, I don't know, in fact, what will happen afterwards." Lady Woodroffe sat down and sighed heavily. "Be it so," she said. "You will go on; you will do your worst." Richard Woodroffe regarded her with a sense of pity, and even of respect. The woman had supported her position by a succession of shameless lies; she was now virtually confessing to him that they were lies. But she had so much to lose--her great position among religious and charitable people, her reputation, the respect which her blameless life and her great abilities had won for her. All these things were threatened. "Madam," he said, his face full of emotion, "if it were only your son to be thought of, I would retire. But there is this poor lady, who is only kept alive, I believe, by the hope and belief that her son will be restored to her. Believe me, if I may speak of pity for you----"