id breathlessly, "I
will be--I AM your friend."

She withdrew her hand and passed it over her eyes. After a moment she
caught his hand again, and, holding it tightly as if she feared he might
fly from her, bit her lip, and then slowly, without looking at him,
said, "I lied to you about myself and Kitty that night; I did not come
with her. I came alone and secretly to Boomville to see--to see the man
who is my husband."

"Your husband!" said Barker in surprise. He had believed, with the rest
of the world, that there had been no communication between them for
years. Yet so intense was his interest in her that he did not notice
that this revelation was leaving now no excuse for his wife's presence
at Boomville.

Mrs. Horncastle went on with dogged bitterness, "Yes, my husband. I went
to him to beg and bribe him to let me see my child. Yes, MY child," she
said frantically, tightening her hold upon his hand, "for I lied to you
when I once told you I had none. I had a child, and, more than that, a
child who at his birth I did not dare to openly claim."

She stopped breathlessly, stared at his face with her former intensity
as if she would pluck the thought that followed from his brain. But
he only moved closer to her, passed his arm over her shoulders with a
movement so natural and protecting that it had a certain dignity in it,
and, looking down upon her bent head with eyes brimming with sympathy,
whispered, "Poor, poor child!"

Whereat Mrs. Horncastle again burst into tears. And then, with her head
half drawn towards his shoulder, she told him all,--all that had passed
between her and her husband,--even all that they had then but hinted at.
It was as if she felt she could now, for the first time, voice all these
terrible memories of the past which had come back to her last night when
her husband had left her. She concealed nothing, she veiled nothing;
there were intervals when her tears no longer flowed, and a cruel
hardness and return of her old imperiousness of voice and manner took
their place, as if she was doing a rigid penance and took a bitter
satisfaction in laying bare her whole soul to him. "I never had a
friend," she whispered; "there were women who persecuted me with their
jealous sneers; there were men who persecuted me with their selfish
affections. When I first saw YOU, you seemed something so apart and
different from all other men that, although I scarcely knew you, I
wanted to tell you, even then, all