“I think advice would be rather thrown away on her just now,” replied Slaney, thinking of what lay by the pool, and of the wet torn face that the dog smelt at; “even Irish people feel things sometimes.” She suddenly became aware of the spring of tears that lies at the back of a shock, and she bit her lip and drove her stick hard into the ground as she walked. “I can only suppose then,” he said, “that you don’t object to hearing your friends publicly libelled.” He held the gate of the wood open for her, and she walked through as stiff as a dart. She knew quite well what sentence of Maria Quin’s it was that was foremost on his ear, and it was intolerable that he should take his stand beside Lady Susan. Her distrust of him had become so invincible that she felt Lady Susan to be a bird in the snare of the fowler; she could not think of her as a confederate. “Can’t you realize,” she said, at last, “that nothing I could say would do any good now?” “I see,” he sneered, while he sought among his cast-iron theories of women for something that should fit this abnormal one. “You mean that it is no use to hope that a woman will hold her tongue, whether it be to her own advantage or not!” The long-pent anger suddenly stirred in her, and with it the resolution that had long lain dormant. “Would it surprise you to hear,” she began, with the sensation of coming into the open, under fire, “that a woman has held her tongue about you for some time past?” He half turned and looked hard at her. “I have ceased to be surprised at anything a woman may do, but I should certainly like to hear the particulars of such a piece of self-sacrifice.” Slaney hesitated. It was nearly impossible to say it. The twilight was falling and the thrushes in the shrubberies below were piercing it with long shafts of rhapsody. Lady Susan and Bunbury were walking under the bare and drooping branches some distance in front. “Well,” repeated Glasgow, “what about this martyr to principle?” “It was I,” she said, and everything around seemed to throb and stand still, like her heart. “Perhaps you will kindly explain what you mean,” he said, very coldly and politely. “You lent me a book last month--the _Fortnightly Review_--and I found a letter to you in it, a letter that you had forgotten was there.” He remained silent for a moment, and then spoke with a jerk-- “May I ask who it was from?” “A woman.” “You read it?” “I could hardly help reading it, it was all on the first sheet.” She looked at him with the courage of an honourable nature owning to what it would self-righteously have despised in another, and he saw the moistness in her eyes. “Oh yes, I understand that quite well,” he replied, with a quickness that did honour both to him and to her. There was a pause. “I burned it at once,” she added.