“I know; and you can annoy me in any way about money, as you always have done; but there your power ends. I should not have been obliged to have recourse to others if you had showed more feeling for my position. But you never showed me any sympathy. I saw in the English papers that you had sold the _petits maîtres_. Why did you not sell them before, and give the proceeds to me?” He looked at her in silence. “It was the same thing with the jewels,” she continued. “You could have induced the others to leave them with me until Jack’s majority. But instead of that you talked high-flown stuff about the law and your duties, and you cared nothing at all what injury and difficulty you caused to me.” He was still silent; she took another cigarette, lighted it, and again continued: “You blame me for what I did. I did what I could. When the hare runs for her life she doesn’t look where she goes. The diamonds are none the worse for being with Beaumont. They were quite safe with him. If my husband had lived, nobody would have known anything about the transaction. His death, immediately on his succession, was disastrous in every way.” “Do you mean that your husband was aware of this loan?” “Yes, certainly,” she said a moment later, without hesitation, for Cocky could not contradict her. “It was his idea first of all.” “It could not have been his idea to borrow of Mr. Massarene, for that transaction took place two months and a half after his death at Staghurst.” “He would have thought it a very good idea if he had been alive!” she said with her short, satirical little laugh: she was afraid of little now, for she saw that her brother knew nothing beyond the mere fact of the loan. “As for the reproduction of the jewels in paste, which you seem to think a crime, several women I know wear imitations of their jewels for safety in these days of ingenious thefts, and leave the originals in deposit at their bankers.” Hurstmanceaux looked at her in silence, wondering why a creature so fair should be born without a conscience. Was she really without one, or was this indifference only a part of the attitude she assumed? Was there something still worse which he did not know? He felt that despair which overcomes a brave man before the shamelessness of a woman. What could he do? He could not kill her. He could not disgrace her. To awaken any conscience in her was hopeless. If she did feel any humiliation she would not show it. For a moment a red mist swam before his eyes and a nervous tremor passed along his muscles; he longed to stamp the life out of her and bruise her accursed beauty into nothingness as a man of Shoreditch, or Montmartre, or the Calle of Venice might have done under such provocation as was his. The moment passed, of course. He could only realize his own powerlessness. There is nothing on earth so powerless as the impotence of a man of honor before the vileness of a woman who is dear to him.