remember
less. She'll only remember your part of it, sir."

She glanced across at him with timid eyes, which asked him to be so
good as to explain: all that had confused her so.

"I don't understand," she murmured helplessly--"I don't understand."

He ignored the interrogation in her eyes with a little gesture, half
irritable and half entreating, which coerced her.

"How did you come there?" he asked. "What was the good----"

His question languished suddenly, and he let both hands fall slowly
upon his knees. In effect, the uselessness of all argument, the
futility of any recrimination in the face of what had been
accomplished, was suddenly borne in upon him with irresistible
force: and his momentary irritation against the malice of
circumstance, the baseness of the man, was swallowed up in a rising
lassitude which simply gave up.

The girl continued after a while, in a low, rapid voice, her eyes
fixed intently upon the opal in an antique ring which shone faintly
upon one of Rainham's quiet hands, as though its steady radiance
helped her speech:

"It was all an accident--an accident. I was sick and tired of
waiting and writing, and getting never a word in reply. My health
went too, last winter, and ever since I have been getting weaker and
worse. I knew what that meant: my mother died of a decline--yes, she
is dead, thank God! this ten years--and it was then, when I knew I
wouldn't get any better, and there was the child to think of, that I
wanted to see him once more. There was a gentleman, too, who
came----"

She broke off for a moment, clasping her thin hands together, which
trembled as though the memory of some past, fantastic terror had
recurred.

"It doesn't matter," she went on presently. "He frightened me, that
was all. He had such a stern, smooth-spoken way with him; and he
seemed to know so much. He said that he had heard of me and my
story, and would befriend me if I would tell him the name of the man
who ruined me. Yes, he would befriend me, help me to lead a
respectable life."

Her sunken eyes flashed for a moment, and her lip was scornfully
curled.

"God knows!" she cried, with a certain rude dignity, "I was always
an honest woman but for Cyril--Dick she called him."

The intimate term, tossed so lightly from those lips, caused Rainham
to quiver, as though she had rasped raw wounds. It was the concrete
touch giving flesh and blood to his vision of her past. It made the
girl's old relation