"Your aunt had been that gait with him herself, in her time?" "Oh, I don't know." "Yes, I twigged that--and then the mealy-mouthed, filthy hag came over me. I on'y guessed, but _you_ knew. Answer me;" and his grip tightened on her throat, and he shook her. "Answer." "Oh, I suppose so." "And that cousin--the one he paid for in foreign parts?" "I suppose so." "Those rooms at the Cottage. They were furnished and set out for you and him to take your pleasure." "He used them for other women--once or twice." "What other women?" "Girls from London." As he questioned her and listened to her answers his passion took a rhythm, upward and downward, from blind wrath to black sorrow; and it seemed that the points reached by the rising curves were becoming less high, while the descending curves went lower and lower, through sorrow into shame, and still down, to fathomless depths of despair. He had heard all that it was necessary to hear. His life that he had thought marvelous and splendid was ridiculous and pitiful; what he had fancied to be success was failure; all that he had been proud of as being gained by his own merit had been brought to him by his wife's disgrace. What more could he learn? Yet he went on questioning her. She swore that she had loved him, that she had quite done with the other when she married him, had been true to him in thought and deed ever since their marriage. But she had been tempted two or three times, through her aunt. Mr. Barradine had desired that she should understand with what affection he always regarded her, and he invited her to meet him; and it was the knowledge that he had come to covet her again that made her sure she could get him to do anything for her. At the same time the knowledge terrified her; and when Dale's trouble began, and things with him seemed to be going from bad to worse, she felt as if a sort of waking nightmare was drawing nearer and nearer. She wrote to Mr. Barradine, simply asking him to exert this influence on behalf of her husband; and the reply--the letter that she tore up--was in these words: "I will do what I can; but why don't you come and ask me yourself?" Of course she knew what that meant. It was at the railway station, when bidding Dale good-by, that she made up her mind to save him at all costs. When he refused to act on Ridgett's advice, when he showed himself so firm, so unyielding, she knew that he was a man going to his doom, unless she could avert the doom. "And, Will--believe it or not--no woman ever loved a husband truer than I loved you at that moment. To see you there so brave and strong and good--and yet certain sure to ruin yourself! Well, I couldn't bear it. And if it was to do again, I'd do it."