"I should have expected you, dear, to have reasoned about this a little more. What's the use of being educated if we give way to superstition, like savages, directly something happens that we don't quite understand? Some day an eclipse of conscious personality, like yours, will come to be understood as well as an eclipse of the moon. Don't let's make it worse by conjuring up superstitious terrors." "At first I thought it was like that--an eclipse of memory. But now I feel more and more it's a different person that's here, it's not I. To-night Cousin David said that sometimes when he met me he expected to find when he got home that his Lady Hammerton had walked away out of the frame. And, Ian, I looked up at that portrait, and suddenly I was reminded of--that fearful night when I came back and saw--something. I am descended from that woman, and you know how wicked she was." Again the strange irritation stirred in the midst of Ian's pity. "Wicked, darling! That's an absurd word to use." "She left her husband. And it's awful that I, who can't understand how any woman could be so wicked as to do that, should be so terribly like her. I feel as though it had something to do with this appalling thing happening to me. Perhaps her sins are being visited on me." She held the lapels of his coat and looked tenderly, yearningly, in his face. "And I could bear it better if--But oh, my Ian! I can't bear to think of you left with something wicked, with some one who doesn't love you, who deceives you, and--" "Milly," he broke in, "I won't have you say things like that. They are absolutely untrue, and I won't have them said." There was a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new to her. When she spoke it was in a gasp. "You love her? You love that wicked, bad woman so much you won't let me tell you what she is?" He drew himself away from her with a gesture, and in a minute answered with cold deliberation: "I cannot cease to love my own wife because--because she's not always exactly the same." They sat silent beside each other. At length Milly rose from the sofa. The tinselled scarf, that other woman's delicate finery, had slipped from the white beauty of her shoulders. She drew it around her again slowly, and slowly with bowed head left the room. CHAPTER XVIII