hole fortunes at her disposal. She had indignantly destroyed
these letters without showing them to him, and would not have thought
of claiming any credit for this had he not forced her to do so by his
brutality towards her. The Indian prince, in particular, had proved
persistent, and even now it was open to her to become mistress of a
gorgeous palace and a regiment of servants.

By way of contrasting the fineness of her own conduct with the
coarseness of his, she did her best to exasperate him about Helen,
applying terrible epithets to her and vowing, in a burst of tiger-like
tragedy, she would destroy the beauty of this woman he had loved with
vitriol, should their paths ever cross. In addition to Helen, there
were general allusions to his mistresses, for Cleo, having begun by
converting singular into plural, now retained both singular and
plural. Lastly, quieting down somewhat amid a flood of tears, she
claimed that Ingram would not have acted in so dastardly a
fashion--he, at least, had always valued her at her true worth. It was
his misfortune, not his fault, that his money affairs had not turned
out well and that he had been unable to build for her the promised
theatre. It was his very sense of the dignity of her genius that made
him object to giving her a less impressive debut. Ingram, too, had had
no thought but for her, and he had been undoubtedly heartbroken at her
leaving him.

And when, in the end, he prevailed upon her to say what she purposed
doing, she informed him that to mark her sense of the degradation that
would be involved in the acceptance of the aid offered by her rival,
she had preferred to borrow five pounds of her maid, who was at least
an old and faithful servant--she had taken her with her from
Hampstead--and who stood by her loyally. Out of these five pounds she
intended to pay the landlady's bill for the week, and the balance
would bring them within the shelter of her parents' home.

Whatever feeling of humiliation Morgan might have had at the
confession of this loan was all but lost in his surprise at her sudden
mention of parents. He had never thought of her at all in relation to
parents or in relation to other human beings whose blood flowed in her
veins. She had pre-eminently struck him as a figure to be taken as
"detached"; his feeling about her, though he had never precisely
formulated it, was that she had not come into existence as other
people, but that, in her case, there had bee