but that her haughtiness
resented a criticism of her conduct ending in a rebuke. By this,
Manston's discreditable object, which had been made hers by compulsion
only, was now adopted by choice. She flung herself into the work.

A fiery man in such a case would have relinquished persuasion and tried
palpable force. A fiery woman added unscrupulousness and evolved daring
strategy; and in her obstinacy, and to sustain herself as mistress, she
descended to an action the meanness of which haunted her conscience to
her dying hour.

'I don't quite see, Mr. Springrove,' she said, 'that I am altogether
what you are pleased to call a stranger. I have known your family, at
any rate, for a good many years, and I know Miss Graye particularly
well, and her state of mind with regard to this matter.'

Perplexed love makes us credulous and curious as old women. Edward was
willing, he owned it to himself, to get at Cytherea's state of mind,
even through so dangerous a medium.

'A letter I received from her' he said, with assumed coldness, 'tells me
clearly enough what Miss Graye's mind is.'

'You think she still loves you? O yes, of course you do--all men are
like that.'

'I have reason to.' He could feign no further than the first speech.

'I should be interested in knowing what reason?' she said, with
sarcastic archness.

Edward felt he was allowing her to do, in fractional parts, what he
rebelled against when regarding it as a whole; but the fact that his
antagonist had the presence of a queen, and features only in the early
evening of their beauty, was not without its influence upon a keenly
conscious man. Her bearing had charmed him into toleration, as Mary
Stuart's charmed the indignant Puritan visitors. He again answered her
honestly.

'The best of reasons--the tone of her letter.'

'Pooh, Mr. Springrove!'

'Not at all, Miss Aldclyffe! Miss Graye desired that we should be
strangers to each other for the simple practical reason that intimacy
could only make wretched complications worse, not from lack of
love--love is only suppressed.'

'Don't you know yet, that in thus putting aside a man, a woman's pity
for the pain she inflicts gives her a kindness of tone which is
often mistaken for suppressed love?' said Miss Aldclyffe, with soft
insidiousness.

This was a translation of the ambiguity of Cytherea's tone which he had
certainly never thought of; and he was too ingenuous not to own it.

'I had never thought of