“And you were right to trust me,” he said, after a pause, during which she had continued to look at him with the same steady and scarcely veiled abhorrence. “I think, Madame, you will own I have shown myself worthy of your trust, since it was not until I was driven out of myself by contemplation of your unhappy position that I allowed you even to guess at the feelings which possess me, the passionate longing to protect you with which your lonely position fills me.” “I thank you very much for your kind feelings, but I hope you will not again express them in the same manner,” answered Audrey, not indeed with the quiet dignity she would have liked to show, but in an unsteady voice and with little gasps for breath between her words. “And please, first of all, to remember not to call me Madame. I won’t be called by that hateful name any longer, whether Lord Clanfield has made a mistake or not about the woman he calls the ‘White Countess’. And if you don’t tell these people that it’s not my name, and that I am not a countess, and have no wish to pretend to be one, why, I shall tell them so myself.” Mr. Candover’s eyes were covered at that moment by his downcast eyelids, so that she could not see the look of dismay and rage that shone in them. But she was thankful to see that he had entirely regained his self-command when he looked up and quietly said:-- “And what name do you mean to take? Do you mean to use your own?” The question was a stab to her. And the shame of her position, the bitterness she felt on account of poor Gerard, cut her so keenly that she could not answer, but stood with her teeth pressed upon her lower lip, and her hands tightly clenched. She felt that the position in which she found herself was intolerable, and a spirit of fierce resentment took the place of the anguish and fear caused by Mr. Candover’s previous behaviour. Disdaining to answer him, and too well aware, indeed, that she would have found a satisfactory reply difficult to make, Audrey, with a gesture which implied that her patience was worn out, swept out of the conservatory without another word. She saw no more of Mr. Candover that evening, but when she returned to the drawing-room, where her absence had caused Mrs. Webster some uneasiness and surprise, she found two of the gentlemen waiting to take leave of her. One of these was Durley Diggs, the active little American secretary; the other was a young man in whom Audrey took something of an uneasy interest. This was a baronet of about two and twenty, a tall, good-looking and good-natured young man who had not long come into the money which he had inherited with his father’s estates, and who showed, she thought, most unwise tendencies in the matter of his companions and of his amusements.