"No; you might think so; but I know."

"You know singularly little about women," said Moya after a pause.

And her tone shook him. But he said that he could only judge by the way
she had taken it now.

There was another pause, in which the proud girl wrestled with her
pride. But at last she told him he was very dull. And she drew a little
nearer, with the ghost of other looks behind her tears.

But the high moon just missed her face.

And Rigden was very dull indeed.

"You had better tell me everything, and give me a chance," she said
dryly.

"What's the use, when the mere fact is enough?"

"I never said it was."

"Oh, Moya, but you know it must be. Think of your people!"

"Why should I?"

"They will have to know."

"I don't see it."

"Ah, but they will," said Rigden, with dire conviction. And though the
change in Moya was now apparent even to him, it wrought no answering
change in Rigden; on the contrary, he fell into a brown study, with dull
eyes fixed no longer upon Moya, but on the high lights in the verandah
far away.

"There's so little to tell," he said at length. "It was a runaway match,
and a desperately bad bargain for my dear mother, yet by no means the
unhappy marriage you would suppose. I have that from her own dear lips,
and I don't think it so extraordinary as I did once. A bad man may still
be the one man for a good woman, and make her happier than the best of
good fellows; it was so in their case. My father was and is a bad man;
there's no mincing the matter. I've stood by him for what he is to me,
not for what he is in himself, for he has gone from bad to worse, like
most prisoners. He was in trouble when he married my mother; the police
were on his tracks even then: they came out here under a false name."

"And your name?" asked Moya, pertinently yet not unkindly; indeed she
was standing close beside him now.

"That is not false," said Rigden. "My mother used it from the time of
her trouble. She would not bring me up under an alias; but she took care
not to let his people or hers get wind of her existence; never wrote
them a line in her poorest days, though her people would have taken her
back--without him. That wouldn't do for my mother. Yet nothing else was
possible. He was sent to the hulks for life."

Moya's face, turned to the light at last, was shining like the moon
itself; and the tears in her eyes were tears of enthusiasm, almost of
pride.

"It was fine of her!" she