He was
trembling with passion--and then the priest said something in his grave,
quiet voice which almost stunned him.

"Has it been done in cruelty, my son? You must examine well the facts
before you assert that. You must not forget that whoever the husband may
be, he has consented to divorce her, and she is now going to give
herself to you. Is that cruelty, my son? Or is it a fine keeping to a
given word? It looks to me more like a noble sacrifice, unless the
Seigneur of Arranstoun was aware before he ever came here that Madame
Howard was his wife."

Lord Fordyce controlled himself. This thing must be thought out.

"No, Michael could not have known it," after a moment or two he
averred. "He even laughed over the name when I told it to him, and said
he had a scapegrace cousin out in Arizona and wondered if the husband
could be the same----"

Then further recollections came with a frightful stab of anguish,
crushing all passion and anger and leaving only a sensation of pain, for
he remembered that his friend had given him his word of honor that he
would not interfere with him in his love-making--and, indeed, would help
him in every way he could, even to lending him Arranstoun for the
honeymoon! That letter of his, too, when he had gone from Heronac,
saying in it casually he hoped that he, Henry, thought that he had
played the game!--Yes, it was all perfectly plain. Michael had come
there in all innocence, and could not be blamed. He remembered numbers
of things unnoticed at the time--his own talk with Sabine when he had
discussed Michael's marriage--and this brought him up suddenly to her
side of the question. Why, in heaven's name, had she not told him the
truth at once? Why had she pretended not to recognize Michael? For,
however Michael might have started, since he, Henry, was not looking at
him, Sabine, whose face he had been gazing into all the while, had shown
no faintest recognition of him. What a superb actress she must be!--or
perhaps, having only seen him those two times in her life, for those
short moments, she really did not recognize him then. The whole thing
was so staggering in its hideous tragedy his brain almost refused to
think; but he said this last thought aloud, and the priest's strange
sudden silence struck even his numbed sense.

"She had only seen him for such a little while--they parted immediately
after the wedding; it was merely an empty ceremony, you know. Why, then,
should she have had