'I was unworthy of your love and your trust,' answered Ida, looking at Miss Wendover with wide, despairing eyes. 'It is quite true--I am his wife--but he has no right to claim me. It was agreed between us that we should part--for ever--that our marriage was to be as if it had never been. It was our secret--nobody was ever to know.' 'And pray, after having married him, why did you wish to cancel your marriage?' asked Colonel Wendover, in a freezing voice. 'You married him of your own free will I suppose?' 'Of my own free will--yes.' 'Then why repent all of a sudden?' She stood for a few moments silent, enduring such an agony of shame as all her sad experiences of life had not yet given her. The bitter, galling truth must be told--and in _his_ hearing. _He_ must be suffered to know how sordid and vile she had been. 'Because I had been deceived,' she faltered at last, her eyelids drooping over those piteous eyes. Brian of the Abbey had advanced into the room by this time. He was standing by his uncle's side, his hand upon his uncle's arm. He wanted, if it were possible, to save Ida from further questioning, to restrain his uncle's wrath. 'I married your nephew under a delusion,' she said. 'I believed that I was marrying wealth and station. I had been told that the Brian Wendover I knew--the man who asked me to be his wife--was the owner of Wendover Abbey.' 'I see,' said the Colonel; 'you wanted to marry Wendover Abbey.' Miss Rylance gave a little silvery laugh--the most highly cultivated thing in laughs--but the scowl she got from Brian of the Abbey checked her vivacity in a breath. 'Oh, I know what a wretch I must seem to you all,' said Ida, looking up at the Colonel with pleading eyes. 'But you have never known what it is to be poor--a genteel pauper--to have your poverty flung into your face like a handful of mud at every hour of your life; to have the instincts, the needs of a lady, but to be poorer and lower in status than any servant; to see your schoolfellows grinning at your shabby boots, making witty speeches about your threadbare gown; to patch, and mend, and struggle, yet never to be decently clad; to have the desire to help others, but nothing to give. If any of you--if you, Miss Rylance, with that exquisite sneer of yours, _you_ who invented the plot that wrecked me--if you had ever endured what I have borne, you would have been as ready as I was to thank Providence for having sent me a rich lover, and to accept him gratefully as my husband.' 'Brian Walford,' interrogated the Colonel, looking severely at his nephew, 'am I to understand that you married this girl without undeceiving her as to the children's, or rather Miss Rylance's, most ill-judged practical joke--that you stood before the altar in God's House, the temple of truth and holiness, and won her by a lie?'