Then his eyes fell on the letter in her hands, and his face reddened and then went very white. It was evident that the handwriting was perfectly familiar to him. Pamela put the letter into his hand. "Read it," she said dully. "Good God!" he cried, and turned the thing he held in hands only a little less unsteady than her own. "How did you get hold of this?" "It came by the post--just now." "Damn!" he muttered under his breath, and read the letter deliberately. When he had read it he crushed it in his palm and thrust it into his pocket. "I would have died sooner than you had read this," he said. He made no attempt, she observed, to refute the charge. Somehow she had not expected him to; from the moment when his eye had fallen upon the letter she realised that the information contained in it was true. His first wife was not dead. "Why didn't you tell me?" she said. She looked at him resentfully with her darkened, pain-filled eyes. "It wasn't fair to me... You've cheated me... You--Oh!" She broke off piteously, and looked away from him out through the window; and he saw that she was weeping. The tears ran down her cheeks, and splashed unheeded on the hands that lay clenched in her lap and made no move to check the bitter rain. Arnott turned his eyes from the piteous face. "I couldn't tell you," he muttered... "I loved you. I dared not risk losing you,--and I believed you would never know." "It's--bigamy," she said, and caught her breath again sharply. "Yes." His voice was sullen. "But that's punishable," Pamela said, and scrutinised him with wide, distressed eyes... "Isn't it?" "Yes." He made a sudden movement. Before she could stay him he was on his knees beside her, with his arms about her, holding her closely. "I wanted you so badly," he said. "It was the only way. Oh! Pamela, believe me, I never meant to hurt you... I never meant you to know. My dear--Oh! my dear, don't turn from me. Forget that you've read that letter,--forget that you ever received it. Let things be as they were before." "But they can't be," she insisted. "I'm not--" She broke off and stared at him, frightened and dismayed. "I'm not even _married_," she added, the horror of this truth revealing itself in her tones. "You are," he asserted sullenly. "I married you..." "But you couldn't," she persisted, "with your wife alive. The law can punish you for bigamy." "Do you want the law to punish me?" he asked. "No," she said. "That wouldn't help me. And... there's the child." He frowned.