'How did you learn that?' said Lord Forestfield, taken off his guard. 'I only got old Vandervelde's letter yesterday morning.' 'I learned it because I made it my business to learn not only that, but everything about you,' said Uffington, speaking with hard earnestness. 'Not from any interest in _you_, God knows; for from the first time I saw you, and heard how you treated your wife, I regarded you with a loathing and an aversion so great that they can scarcely be said to have increased now, when we have been thrown so much together. Lady Forestfield's mother was my kindest friend, and seeing how much her daughter wanted an outstretched hand to help her in her solitude and her misery, I determined to repay, so far as I could, the kindness I had experienced when I stood in need of it.' 'And you stretched out your hand to help a very pretty woman, did you?' growled Forestfield. 'What a generous, unselfish creature!' 'Less selfish than appears at first sight,' said Uffington; 'for in carrying out my plan I have had to endure things against which my sense of decency, to say nothing of my pride, revolted; such as putting up with your familiarity, Lord Forestfield, and mixing with a miserable set of Pharisees, who consent to receive you into their society while they scorn your wife, whose crime has been really the outcome of your cruelty.' 'You're a pretty kind of fellow to talk in this way!' said Forestfield, looking up from under his eyebrows and speaking in a thick voice. 'You're a nice lot to preach virtue, and the necessity for domestic happiness, and that sort of thing; and you practise what you preach, don't you, and always did? You never heard of such a thing as a fellow in the Guards running off with another mans wife, say to Switzerland now, and living there with her? That wouldn't enter into your scheme of morality, would it?' 'This is the second time you have dared to make allusion to that event in my life, Lord Forestfield,' said Uffington, with a strong effort at self-control, 'and I advise you not to repeat it. In a blundering way, however, you happen to have hit upon the truth. What promised at the time to be but a mere episode in my reckless youth had its influence on my whole career, and made me what I am; a man neither ashamed to acknowledge his guilt nor professing to be sorry for his misdeeds. If the lady to whom you have made reference lost caste in the eyes of that society of which you still continue a flourishing member, she, at all events, passed the remainder of her life in peace, and was secured from the outrage to which she had been subjected by one whose duty it was to love and protect her. God knows, I set myself up as no judge of my fellow-creatures, but it is from what I knew of that lady's history and what I saw of her sufferings that I have learned to understand and pity your wife.'