"Katherine," said Odd, "I can only beg you to believe that I have struggled--for your sake, for her sake. Until this evening I thought that neither of you would ever know the truth." This bracketing of Hilda's injury with hers stank in Katherine's nostrils. She controlled a quivering rage that ran through her, and, speaking a little more slowly for the tension she put upon herself-- "I can imagine no greater humiliation than the one you were so chivalrously preparing for me," she said. "Marriage with an unloving man! I can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved the truth from you, and how dared you think of degrading me by withholding it?" The white indignation of her own words almost impressed Katherine with their sincerity. She had seen the truth, and Peter's futile efforts to withhold it from her had filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his stupidity. But in the light of his present relapse from fidelity, the retrospect grew lurid. "Katherine," said Odd gloomily, "I would not so have insulted you after this. As long as I kept my secret there would have been no insult." "I think I should have preferred the jilting before. You might have waited, Peter." Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes on Odd, and there had been growing in her a certain sense of loss, most illogical, most painful. Hilda had won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly knew for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance as she turned her eyes upon her sister. "So at last your long fidelity has been rewarded, Hilda," she said. Hilda's wild wide gaze, her parted lips of mute agony, gave her the stricken look of a miserable animal with the fangs of a pack of hounds at its throat. Odd sickened at the sight; it maddened him too, and long resentments, long kept under, sprang up fierce and indifferent to cruelty. "Katherine, say anything--anything you will to me," and Odd's voice broke a little as he spoke, "but not one word to her! Not one word! It comes badly from you, Katherine, badly; for you have played the vampire with the rest of them! This child has given you all her very life." He held Hilda to him as he spoke; his look, his gesture those of a man driven to fury by the hint of an attack on his best beloved; and Katherine, her head bent, looked at them both from under her straight eyebrows, breathing quickly. "Her life has been one long self-immolation. It was too much for me this evening. I realized what she had never told me, the past years and this past month of drudgery and loneliness and insult! She nursed your mother; she did the work of the servants you and your father took with you; she earned the money for the bare necessaries of life--you and your father having the luxuries; she bore insult, as I said. And once, and once only, I saw her crushed, and like the brute I am, like the dastard I am, I too joined the ranks of the egotists, I too heaped misery upon her; I told her I loved her, and I took her into my arms as you saw us."