ed he was even more
agitated. He walked to and fro in that lovely drawing-room of his--just
as you were doing here not long since. I was a little afraid.'

'Afraid of what?' demanded Hugo.

'I don't know--of him, lest he might do something fatal, irretrievable;
something--I don't know. And then, being alone with him in that palace
of a place! Well, he burst out suddenly into a series of statements
about himself, and about his future, and his intentions, and his
feelings towards me. And these statements were so extraordinary and so
startling that I could not think he had invented them. I believed them,
as I had believed in the sincerity of his threat to kill himself if I
would not listen to him.'

'And what were they--these statements?' Hugo inquired.

Camilla waved aside the interruptions, and continued: '"Now," he said,
"will you marry me? Will you marry me now?"'

She paused and glanced at Hugo, who observed that her eyes were filling
with tears.

'And then?' murmured Hugo soothingly.

'Then I agreed to marry him.'

And with these words she cried openly.

'If anyone had told me beforehand,' she resumed, 'that I should be so
influenced by a man's--a man's acting, I would have laughed. But I
was--I was. He succeeded completely.'

'You have not said what these extraordinary statements were,' Hugo
insisted.

'Don't ask me,' she entreated, drying her eyes. 'It is enough that I was
hoodwinked. If you have had no hand in this plot, don't ask me. I am too
ashamed, too scornful of my credulity, to repeat them. You would laugh.'

'Should I?' said Hugo, smiling gravely. 'What occurred next?'

'The next step was that Mr. Tudor asked me to accompany his housekeeper
to the housekeeper's room, and on the other side of the passage from the
drawing-room I was to dine with him. The housekeeper is a Mrs. Dant, a
kind, fat, lame old woman, and she produced this cloak and this hat, and
so on, and said that they were for me! I was surprised, but I praised
them and tried them on for a moment. You must remember that I was his
affianced wife. I talked with Mrs. Dant, and prepared myself for
dinner, and then I went back to the drawing-room, and found Mr. Tudor
ready for dinner. I asked him why he had got the clothes, and he said he
had got them this very morning merely on the chance of my accepting his
proposal out of pity for him. And I believed that, too.'

There was a silence.

'But that is not the end?' Hugo encouraged h