"Do you expect me to believe that?" he asked contemptuously. "I'm not a blind fool!... Do you remember, I told you that a man asks all of a woman--past as well as future. Well, you can't give me the past. It belongs to some one else--to Brabazon. I suppose you meant to marry him. And then I come along--and I'm worth more. I don't flatter myself I'm more attractive!"--grimly. "Years ago a woman threw me over because I was poor. And now another woman is ready to throw over some one else and marry me because I'm rich. It's the same stale old story. You're not going to ask me to believe you accepted me from disinterested affection, are you?" While he spoke, Ann had been standing motionless, every nerve of her taut and strained to the utmost. Outwardly unflinching, inwardly she felt as though he were raining blows upon her. It was all so sordid and horrible. It dragged love through the clinging mire of suspicion and distrust till its radiant wings were soiled and fouled beyond recognition. "I'm not going to ask you to believe--anything." She spoke very quietly. A bitter, tortured pride upheld her. "If you can think--that--of me, it would be useless asking you to believe anything I might say. Yesterday"--her voice trembled but she steadied it again--"yesterday you told me that the essence of love was possession. It isn't, Eliot.... It's faith ... and trust." In the silence that followed the man and woman stood gazing dumbly at each other, and for a brief moment love and faith hung quivering in the balance. Then the balance tilted. The heavy burden of suspicion weighed it down, and without another word Eliot turned and left the room. Ann did not move. She stood quite still, her arms hanging straight down at her sides. The Dents de Loup--wolf's teeth! Well, the jaws of the wolf had closed, crushing her happiness for ever between their merciless white fangs. She knew now the meaning of that nebulous, distorted shape which had seemed to come betwixt her and the man she loved. It was the grey shadow of distrust which had sprung out from the hidden places of the past and now lay, dark and impenetrable, dividing them for ever. CHAPTER XXIV AFTERMATH "I beg your pardon!" Instinctively Cara apologised, although actually the collision had been no fault of hers. The man with whom she had collided had been striding along with bent head, completely absorbed in his own thoughts, and had awakened too late to the fact that some one was coming towards him along the narrow bridle-path through the woods. He lifted his hat mechanically and murmured some sort of apology, but his eyes remained blank and seemed to look through and beyond the woman into whom he had just cannoned without seeing her--certainly without recognising her.