Darrow instantly perceived what dread suspicion again possessed her, and the sense that it was not wholly unjustified caused him a passing pang of shame. But it did not turn him from his purpose. “I’m an old friend of Mrs. Leath’s. It’s not unnatural that Madame de Chantelle should talk to me.” She dropped the screen on the table and stood up, turning on him the same small mask of wrath and scorn which had glared at him, in Paris, when he had confessed to his suppression of her letter. She walked away a step or two and then came back. “May I ask what Madame de Chantelle said to you?” “She made it clear that she should not encourage the marriage.” “And what was her object in making that clear to YOU?” Darrow hesitated. “I suppose she thought----” “That she could persuade you to turn Mrs. Leath against me?” He was silent, and she pressed him: “Was that it?” “That was it.” “But if you don’t--if you keep your promise----” “My promise?” “To say nothing ... nothing whatever...” Her strained look threw a haggard light along the pause. As she spoke, the whole odiousness of the scene rushed over him. “Of course I shall say nothing ... you know that...” He leaned to her and laid his hand on hers. “You know I wouldn’t for the world...” She drew back and hid her face with a sob. Then she sank again into her seat, stretched her arms across the table and laid her face upon them. He sat still, overwhelmed with compunction. After a long interval, in which he had painfully measured the seconds by her hard-drawn breathing, she looked up at him with a face washed clear of bitterness. “Don’t suppose I don’t know what you must have thought of me!” The cry struck him down to a lower depth of self-abasement. “My poor child,” he felt like answering, “the shame of it is that I’ve never thought of you at all!” But he could only uselessly repeat: “I’ll do anything I can to help you.” She sat silent, drumming the table with her hand. He saw that her doubt of him was allayed, and the perception made him more ashamed, as if her trust had first revealed to him how near he had come to not deserving it. Suddenly she began to speak. “You think, then, I’ve no right to marry him?” “No right? God forbid! I only meant----” “That you’d rather I didn’t marry any friend of yours.” She brought it out deliberately, not as a question, but as a mere dispassionate statement of fact. Darrow in turn stood up and wandered away helplessly to the window. He stood staring out through its small discoloured panes at the dim brown distances; then he moved back to the table. “I’ll tell you exactly what I meant. You’ll be wretched if you marry a man you’re not in love with.” He knew the risk of misapprehension that he ran, but he estimated his chances of success as precisely in proportion to his peril. If certain signs meant what he thought they did, he might yet--at what cost he would not stop to think--make his past pay for his future.