spoken.

'You hanged him!' she whispered, dropping the words one by one, as though
she was striving to weigh them.

'Yes. I have been blamed for it,' he replied with no change of voice.
'People said I was damaging the prestige of the white man. The
argument bothered me, I confess, but I think they were wrong. I should
have damaged that prestige infinitely more if I had punished him
secretly or--'

'Oh, don't!' she cried, with a sharp interruption, and she stared at him
with eyes dilating in horror, almost in fear. 'You can discuss it like
that,--the man I had been engaged to,--you hanged him!'

She ended with a moan of actual pain and covered her face with her hands.
On the instant Drake woke to a full comprehension of all that he had
said, and understood something of the humiliation which it meant to her.

Clarice was sitting huddled in her chair, her fingers pressed lightly on
her eyes, while now and again a shiver shot through her frame.

'Still I was bound to tell her,' Drake thought. He waited for a little,
wondering whether she would look up, but she made no movement. An emerald
ring upon her finger caught the light and winked at him maliciously,
leering at him, he fancied. There was nothing more for him to say, and he
quietly went out of the room.

The click of the door-handle roused Clarice. She saw that the room was
empty, and, drawing a breath of relief, started out of her chair.
Standing thus she heard Drake's footsteps descending the stairs, and
after a pause the slamming of the hall-door. Then she went to the
fireplace and knelt down close to it, warming her hands at the blaze.

'The degradation of it!' she whispered.

CHAPTER VII

Bit by bit she sought to reconstruct the scene, piecing it together out
of Drake's words; but somehow that scene would not be reconstructed. She
gradually found herself considering Drake's words as a light thrown upon
the man who spoke them, rather than as the description of an actual
incident. The humiliation which she experienced made her shrink with a
certain repulsion from her recollections of Gorley and dwell instead upon
the contrasting tones in Drake's voice, the contrasting expressions upon
his face when he spoke to her and when he merely narrated his story. In
the first instance gentleness had been the dominant characteristic, in
the second indifference; and that very indifference, while it repelled
her, magnetised her thoughts.

Something indeed of