help you."

His attention came back to her.

"Yes, Kitty, I believe you did."

She gulped down a sob. His tone was so odd, so remote.

"Many people have done such things. I know they have. Why--why, it was
only meant--as a skit--to make people laugh! There's <i>no</i> harm in it,
William."

Ashe, without speaking, took up the book and looked back at certain
pages, which he seemed to have marked. Kitty's feeling as she watched
him was the feeling of the condemned culprit, held dumb and strangled in
the grip of his own sense of justice, and yet passionately conscious how
much more he could say for himself than anybody is ever likely to say
for him.

"When did you have the first idea of this book, Kitty?"

"About a year ago," she said, in a low voice.

"In October? At Haggart?"

Kitty nodded.

Ashe thought. Her admission took him back to the autumn weeks at
Haggart, after the Cliffe crisis and the rearrangement of the ministry
in the July of that year. He well remembered that those weeks had been
weeks of special happiness for both of them. Afterwards, the winter had
brought many renewed qualms and vexations. But in that period, between
the storms of the session and Kitty's escapades in the hunting-field,
memory recalled a tender, melting time--a time rich in hidden and
exquisite hours, when with Kitty on his breast, lip to lip and heart to
heart, he had reaped, as it seemed to him, the fruits of that indulgence
which, as he knew, his mother scorned. And at that very moment, behind
his back, out of his sight, she had begun this atrocious thing.

He looked at her again--the bitterness almost at his lips, almost beyond
his control.

"I wish I knew what could have been your possible object in writing
it?"

She sat up and confronted him. The color flamed back again into her pale
cheeks.

"You know I told you--when we had that talk in London--that I wanted to
write. I thought it would be good for me--would take my thoughts
off--well, what had happened. And I began to write this--and it amused
me to find I could do it--and I suppose I got carried away. I loved
describing you, and glorifying you--and I loved making caricatures of
Lady Parham--and all the people I hated. I used to work at it whenever
you were away--or I was dull and there was nothing to do.

"Did it never occur to you," said Ashe, interrupting, "that it might get
you--get us both--into trouble, and that you ought to tell me?"

She wavered.