?"

"No," said Kittredge hoarsely, and his eye was beginning to flame, "my
memory needs no refreshing; I know what I did, I know what I endured. There
was passion enough and jealousy enough, but that was a year ago. If I had
found her then dining with a man in a private room, I don't know what I
might have done. Perhaps I should have killed both of them and myself, too,
for I was mad then; but my madness left me. You seem to know a great deal
about passion, sir; did you ever hear that it can change into loathing?"

"You mean--" began the judge with a puzzled look, while Mrs. Wilmott
recoiled in dismay.

"I mean that I am fighting for my life, and now that _she_ has admitted
this thing," he eyed the woman scornfully, "I am free to tell the truth,
all of it."

"That is what we want," said Hauteville.

"I thought I loved her with a fine, true love, but she showed me it was
only a base imitation. I offered her my youth, my strength, my future, and
she would have taken them and--broken them and scattered them in my face
and--and laughed at me. When I found it out, I--well, never mind, but you
can bet all your pretty French philosophy I didn't go about Paris looking
for billiard players to kill on her account."

It was not a gallant speech, but it rang true, a desperate cry from the
soul depths of this unhappy man, and Pussy Wilmott shrank away as she
listened.

"Then why did you quarrel with Martinez?" demanded the judge.

"Because he was interfering with a woman whom I _did_ love and _would_
fight for----"

"For God's sake, stop," whispered the lawyer.

"I mean I would fight for her if necessary," added the American, "but I'd
fight fair, I wouldn't shoot through any hole in a wall."

"Then you consider your love for this other woman--I presume you mean the
girl at Notre-Dame?"

"Yes."

"You consider your love for her a fine, pure love in contrast to the other
love?"

"The other wasn't love at all, it was passion."

"Yet you did more for this lady through passion," he pointed to Mrs.
Wilmott, "than you have ever done for the girl through your pure love."

"That's not true," cried Lloyd. "I was a fool through passion, I've been
something like a man through love. I was selfish and reckless through
passion, I've been a little unselfish and halfway decent through love. I
was a gambler and a pleasure seeker through passion, I've gone to work at a
mean little job and stuck to it and lived on what I've earned--t