She did not understand that if he let himself be robbed he did so with a purpose and not out of feebleness. She did not understand that, although he was hypnotized by her because he was under the influence of a woman for the first time, there was always alive underneath his obedience the sharp, keen, brutal selfishness which had made him the great man he was. “What is the trouble, my lady?” he said, leaning forward, his hands on his knees in his usual attitude. “Why, lord, you’re no more made for trouble than a white cockatoo’s for mud and rain.” There was not a soul on the terrace; the attendant who had brought the tea-tray had retired; there was the scream and roar of a steam-tug coming up the river in the fog, and a factory bell on the opposite shore was clanging loudly: she thought she should hear those two sounds in her ears as long as ever she should live. She knew that there was no time to lose, that the moments were tearing along like sleuth-hounds, that she must tell him now or never, must get his help or be ruined. She was of high physical courage; she had slid from the back of a rearing horse; she had never lost her nerve on a yacht-deck in a storm, when men were washed overboard like chickens; she had been perfectly cool and self-possessed one awful night on a Highland mountain when she and her whole party had lost their way for twelve hours of snow-drift and hurricane; but now, for the first time in her life, she was nerveless, and felt her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth and her spirit fail her. “Come, keep up your pecker,” said Mr. Massarene in what he meant to be a kindly encouragement. “Come, tell me what the matter is, my pretty one.” She started like a doe past whose side a bullet whistles as the odious familiarity struck her ear--the familiarity which she did not dare to resent, the familiarity which told her how much the expression of her face must have confessed already. With dilated nostrils, through which her breath came and went rapidly and in short pulsations, she plunged midmost into her story: the story as arranged and decorated and trimmed by her own intelligent skill, wherein she was plainly the victim of circumstance, of her own ignorance, of a tradesman’s deceitfulness, and of her relatives’ cruelty and harshness. The old duke, she averred, had given her the jewels; but it seemed there was nothing to show that he had done so, and her brother and brothers-in-law were so inconceivably base as to doubt her word for it, and to claim them for the heir as “real estate.” No woman, she thought, had ever been so brutally treated in the whole history of the world. She spoke at first hesitatingly and with visible embarrassment, but she grew more at her ease as she got her story well in hand, and she became eloquent in the description of her wrongs.