His sister seemed to have awaited this incautious exclamation. "You confess, then?" she said, pleased. He hesitated. "Confess! There is nothing to confess! A few scrawls belonging to the time of that boy-and-girl flirtation which went on under your eyes. Beyond that, I never had a line from her." She looked at him again with her tired smile. "You are stubborn, dear friend," she said. "Your whilom mistress capitulated at once. She did me the doubtful honour of making me her confidante, but the _rôle_ was not to my taste. The very next moment I showed her the door." Leo saw at last that his secret, for good or ill, was in his sister's possession. To deny any more would be sheer madness. "And instead of using your knowledge to help and to save," he said, grinding his teeth, "you must needs rush and confide it to the bosom of our old private chaplain, and through that crooked channel try to ruin your brother's honourable name and peace of mind, eh?" She shrugged her shoulders. "He knew it long ago," she responded. "How? From whom?" "From Rhaden himself." "The hound! the hound! He and I were sworn to secrecy. He has broken his vows to the dead." "Do you deserve anything else?" He leapt up. "Hannah!" he said, controlling himself with difficulty, "I should advise you to adopt another tone, or else I may forget that we are the same flesh and blood." "Alas that we are!" she replied, folding her hands. A voice cried within him, "Jeer at her, overwhelm her with your scorn and contempt!" but his victorious courage had forsaken him. He could only utter a hoarse, jarring laugh. Her eye rested on him, hard and pitiless, and he felt a narrowing of his heart as if iron hoops gradually encircled it. In his despair he bethought him of the covenant of friendship, in which Johanna had played the part of priestess. "Is he not your friend as well as mine?" he asked. "Why did you not warn him? It was in your power to avert the evil. Why didn't you do it?" A smile of self-torture hovered about her lips. "That is my concern. On that point I refuse to answer you," she said. It dawned upon him faintly that here somewhere was the key that might solve the riddle presented by her distraught mind, but before he could put the thought into words it had eluded him. "And what of our covenant?" he stammered--"our old covenant?" "That was broken long ago," she answered, while in her bitterness a dark flush mounted to her cheek. "It was broken when you both put me aside to play with that white kitten. Neither of you troubled your heads about me then. And when I became engaged, no one asked me why I did it. Even _he_ took no interest. And what I have suffered as wife of an adventurer ... who knows or cares? Or how he bundled me about from racecourse to gambling-saloon, and from gambling-saloon to racecourse. Ah, what a life that was! But why do I talk of myself? I too only got what I deserved." "What have you to reproach yourself with?" he asked.