There is no need to record every word that was spoken there; it was the old story of a man's selfish guilty love, and a woman's sinful weakness. He spoke, and Clarissa heard him, not willingly, but with faint efforts of resistance that ended in nothing. She heard him. Never again could she meet Daniel Granger's honest gaze as she had done--never, it seemed to her, could she lose the sense of her sin. He told her how she had ruined his life. That was his chief reproach, and a reproach that a woman can rarely hear unmoved. He painted in the briefest words the picture of what he might have been, and what he was. If his life were wrecked utterly--and from his own account of himself it must needs be so,--the wreck was her fault. He had been ready to sacrifice everything for her. She had basely cheated him. His upbraiding stung her too keenly; she could keep her secret no longer. "I had promised Laura Armstrong," she said--"I had promised her that no power on earth should tempt me to marry you--if you should ask me." "You had promised!" he cried contemptuously. "Promised that shallow trickster! I might have known she had a hand in my misery. And you thought a promise to her more sacred than good faith to me? That was hard, Clarissa." "It was hard," she answered, in a heart-broken voice. "My God!" he cried, looking at her with those passionate eyes, "and yet you loved me all the time?" "With all my heart," she faltered, and then hid her face in her hands. It seemed as if the confession had been wrung from her somehow. In the next moment she hated herself for having said the words, and calming herself with a great effort, said to him quietly. "And now that you know how weak I was, when I seemed indifferent to you, have pity upon me, Mr. Fairfax." "Pity!" he exclaimed. "It is not a question of pity; it is a question of two lives that have been blighted through your foolish submission to that plotting woman. But there must be some recompense to be found in the future for all the tortures of the past. I have broken every tie for your sake, Clarissa; you must make some sacrifice for me." Clarissa looked at him wonderingly. Was he so mad as to suppose that she was of the stuff that makes runaway wives? "Your father tempted my mother, Mr. Fairfax," she said, "but I thank Heaven she escaped him. The role of seducer seems hereditary in your family. You could not make me break my word when I was free to marry you; do you believe that you can make me false to my husband?" "Yes, Clarissa. I swore as much that night in the orchard--swore that I would win you, in spite of the world." "And my son," she said, with the tone she might have used if he had been one-and-twenty, "is he to blush for his mother by and by?"