"It is a curious thing that people like Senator March, who have never been tempted, put all poor sinners in the wrong. I feel it every moment that I am with him. I never had this feeling with Guy Vernon, because from the day I married him his wickedness and his weakness were plain to me. But there is a compelling honesty about a man like Senator March from which one can’t get away; it is like my father’s. Senator March thinks I am marrying him for love; you think I am marrying him for money. This last is true, and I can’t deny it, but I also have a disinterested motive--it will make my father happy and put him at ease concerning me. I have a good many debts of which my father knows nothing, and which he would pay, if he knew of them, with his last shilling. I couldn’t keep them from him much longer and I dreaded to tell him. Now he is spared all that. I had the satisfaction of dealing honestly with Senator March when I told him that I must still give a part of my life to my father. He kissed my hand and told me he loved me the better because I loved my father so well." Yes, it was the only redeeming love which Alicia Vernon had ever known, and it had in it a strange element of nobility and perfidy. "I hope sincerely you may be happy," was all that Sir Percy Carlyon said. "I don’t know whether I wish you to be happy or not," Alicia replied in the same low voice. "At least the past is now a closed book between us." "Is the past ever a closed book? Certainly not to a woman. There are some things which are bloodstains upon the page of life and sink through and through its pages until at the very last there is still a red stain. Anyway, I don’t hate Senator March and I don’t wish to make him unhappy. That is as much as I can feel for any man now, but I could chop him to pieces for my father’s sake or for--" The sentence remained unfinished. Alicia’s wild, unreasoning passion, mingled with revenge, regret and chagrin, died hard. There had never been a moment in which she would not have considered a marriage with Sir Percy Carlyon as imprudent and even disastrous. But there had never been a moment, not even the present, when she would not have rushed into this joyous madness. She turned and walked up and down the room once or twice, saddened, as all sentient beings are, when looking down an abyss in which they long to throw themselves, struggling fiercely against the restraining hand. Sir Percy, quite immovable, stood in the same place until Alicia turned towards him and spoke in her usual, quiet tones. "But I have this to say to you: if, after you are married, you assume that your wife is too good to breathe the same air with me, you may expect me to resent it. We may be in Washington together, remember, for some time, and if I am unjustly treated there will be a catastrophe, and this you may count upon." Just then General Talbott’s bedroom door opened and he walked in.