"When did I ever give you the right to delve into my private affairs?" he asked, with amazing cruelty. "We're married,--isn't that enough? I've given you everything I have except my independence. You can't ask for more than that,--from me." He added "from me" because the expression of pain on her pretty face made him out to be a brute, and he was not that. He tried to hedge by the use of those two small words and put it to her, without explanation, that he was different from most men,--more careless and callous to the old-fashioned vows of marriage, if she liked, but different. That might be due to character or upbringing or the times to which he belonged. He wasn't going to argue about it. The fact remained. "I'll take you back," he added. But she blocked the way. "I only want your love," she said. "If you've taken that away from me, nothing else counts." He gave a sort of groan. Her persistence was appalling, her courage an indescribable reproach. For a moment he remained silent, with a drawn face and twitching fingers, strangely white and wasted, like a man who had been through an illness,--a caricature of the once easy-going Gilbert Palgrave, the captain of his fate and the master of his soul. "All right then," he said, "if you must know, you shall, but do me the credit to remember that I did my best to leave things vague and blurred." He took her by the elbow and put her into a chair. With a touch of his old thoughtfulness and rather studied politeness he chose one that was untouched by the sun that came low over the dune. Then he sat down and bent forward and looked her full in the eyes. "This is going to hurt you," he said, "but you've asked for the truth, and as everything seems to be coming to a head, you'd better have it, naked and undisguised. In any case, you're one of the women who always gets hurt and always thrives on it. You're too earnest and sincere to be able to apply eye-wash to the damn thing we call life, aren't you?" "Yes, Gilbert," she answered, with the look of one who had been placed in front of a firing squad, without a bandage over her eyes. There was a brief pause, filled by what he had called the everlasting drumming of the sea.