The waiter brought the tea, and Hugh leaned back and watched her as she poured it out. And, watching her, there came to him a vision of the bright morning room at Hurst Dormer, a vision of all the old familiar things he had known since boyhood: and in that vision, that day-dream, he saw her sitting where his mother once had sat, and she was pouring out tea, even as now. A clearer, stronger vision this than any he had had in the old days of Marjorie. He smiled at the thought of those dreams, so utterly broken and dead and wafted away into the nothingness of which they had been built. “You sent for me to help you?” “Yes!” A tinge of colour rose in her cheeks and waxed till her cheeks and even her throat were flooded with a brilliant, glorious flush, and then, suddenly as it had come, it died away again, leaving her whiter than before. “I wanted your help. I felt that I had a right to ask it, seeing that you—you—” “Have caused you trouble and annoyance? You wrote that,” he said. She bowed her head. “What you did, has brought more trouble, more shame, more annoyance to me than I can ever explain. I do not ask you to tell me why you did it—it was cruel and mean, unmanly; but you did it. And it can never be undone, so I ask for no reasons, no explanations. They—they do not interest me now. You have brought me trouble and—even danger—and so I turned to you, to ask your help. I have the right, have I not the right—to demand it?” “The greatest right on earth,” he said. “Joan, how can I help you?” But she did not answer immediately, for the answer would be difficult. “When you played with a woman’s name,” she said, “you played with the most fragile, the most delicate and easily breakable thing there is. Do you realise that? A woman’s fair name is her most sacred possession, and yet you played with mine, used it for your own purpose, and so have brought me to shame and misery.” “Joan,” he leaned towards her, “how—how—tell me how?” “Three days ago,” she said quietly, “I submitted and paid three thousand pounds blackmail, rather than that your name and mine, linked together, should be dragged in the mire!” It was almost as though those white hands of hers had struck him a heavy blow between the eyes. Hugh sat and stared at her in amaze. Her words seemed obscure, scarcely possible to understand, yet he had gathered in the sense of them. “Three days ago I submitted and paid three thousand pounds blackmail rather than your name and mine, linked together, should be dragged in the mire.” A girl might well shrink to tell a man what she must tell him, to go into explanations that were an offence to the purity of her mind. Yet, listening to her, looking at her, at the pale, proud young face, white as marble, Hugh Alston knew that he had never admired and reverenced her as he did now.