He was standing by the open window, and turned his head quickly. Sir Karl! "What's amiss, Lucy?" he asked. "I--I--I know all about your secret at the Maze," she said with a great burst of emotion, her chest heaving, her breath coming in gasps. Sir Karl started as though he had been shot. His very lips turned of an ashy whiteness. "Lucy! You cannot know it!" "Heaven knows I do," she answered. "I have learnt it all this day. Oh, how could you so deceive me?" Sir Karl's first act was to dart to the door that opened on the corridor and bolt it. He then opened the two doors leading to the chambers on either side, looked to see that no one was in either of them, shut the doors again, and bolted them. "Sir Karl, this has nearly killed me." "Hush!" he breathed. "Don't talk of it aloud, for the love of God!" "Why did you marry me?" she asked. "Why, indeed," he retorted, his voice one of sad pain. "I have reproached myself enough for it since, Lucy." She was silent. The answer angered her; and she had need of all her best strength, the strength she had so prayed for, to keep her lips from a cruel answer. She sat in her low dressing-chair, gazing at him with reproachful eyes. He said no more just then. Well-nigh overwhelmed with the blow, he stood back against the window-frame, his arms folded, his face one of pitiful anguish. Lucy, his wife, had got hold of the dreadful secret that was destroying his own peace, and that he had been so cunningly planning to conceal. "How did you learn it?" he asked. "I shall never tell you," she answered with quiet firmness, resolved not to make mischief by betraying Theresa. "I know it, and that is enough. Put it down, if you choose, that it was revealed to me by accident--or that I guessed at." "But, Lucy, it is necessary I should know." "I have spoken, Sir Karl. I will never tell you." The evening breeze came wafting into that room of pain; cooling, it might be, their fevered brows, though they were not conscious of it. Lady Andinnian resumed. "The unpardonable deceit you practised on my father and mother----" Sir Karl's start of something like horror interrupted her. "They must never know it, Lucy. In mercy to us all, you must join with me in concealing it from them." "It was very wicked in you to have concealed it from them at all. At least, to have married me _with_ such a secret--for I conclude you could not have really dared to tell them. They deserved better at your hands. I was their only daughter: all they had to love." "Yes, it was wrong. I have reproached myself since worse than you can reproach me. But I did not know the worst then."