All this Millicent knew. It was not wonderful that she hesitated, that she was silent, or answered the searching questions put to her by the young lawyer slowly and evasively. She was putting off the moment in which she must decide between his honor and her own. She remembered the indignant look Deering had cast upon Graham in the court-room, the cool manner in which Barbara had spoken of him, Mrs. Deering’s grieved silence respecting the man who had been so valued a friend to her, and, worst of all, Galbraith’s openly expressed doubt of his innocence. A woman of a smaller nature who had endured Millicent’s cruel experience might, too, have doubted Graham; but she had fathomed his nature more truly in a few months than had his lifelong friends. She knew that in it there was no room for one ignoble thought. His faults she recognized more clearly than if she had loved him less. She knew him to be selfish, with the selfishness of genius; hard of heart, with the indifference to human pain common to those men who are capable of enduring the most terrible suffering; intolerant of those who differed from him, with the steadfast knowledge that his thoughts and opinions had been moulded from no contact with other minds, but attained with pain and weariness of spirit, built up from his inner consciousness, the result of thought and experience, not of the study of other men’s minds and actions. As Galbraith continued to question her, she answered clearly all that he said, while her mind, with a dual consciousness, carried on its separate train of thought. She realized that if Maurice Galbraith were not himself convinced of Graham’s innocence, his efforts to disprove Horton’s accusation would be half-hearted, perfunctory, and without the moral weight of honest conviction. If he were to learn the true reason of the breach between Graham and herself, he must know it immediately,--that very night. That her confession would clear the man she loved from every suspicion she never doubted, and yet--she did not speak. It was so hard to tell the story of her broken life; she was not strong enough. To any other it would have been easier to bare her secret than to this man who reverenced her, who had told her, with look and deed and tender thought, that he loved her.