t to
know that. Do you suppose I have never thought of it;--what it would
be to be a man's mistress instead of his wife. If I had not I should
be a thing to be hated and despised. When once I had done it I should
hate and despise myself. I should feel myself to be loathsome, and,
as it were, a beast among women. But why did they not let me marry
him, instead of driving me to this? And though I might have destroyed
myself, I should have saved the man who is still my husband. Do you
know, I told him all that,--told him that if I had gone away with
Burgo Fitzgerald he would have another wife, and would have children,
and would--?"

"You told your husband that you had thought of leaving him?"

"Yes; I told him everything. I told him that I dearly loved that poor
fellow, for whom, as I believe, nobody else on earth cares a single
straw."

"And what did he say?"

"I cannot tell you what he said, only that we are all to go to Baden
together, and then to Italy. But he did not seem a bit angry; he very
seldom is angry, unless at some trumpery thing, as when he threw the
book away. And when I told him that he might have another wife and a
child, he put his arm round me and whispered to me that he did not
care so much about it as I had imagined. I felt more like loving him
at that moment than I had ever done before."

"He must be fit to be an angel."

"He's fit to be a cabinet minister, which, I'm quite sure, he'd like
much better. And now you know everything; but no,--there is one thing
you don't know yet. When I tell you that, you'll want to make him
an archangel or a prime minister. 'We'll go abroad,' he said,--and
remember, this was his own proposition, made long before I was able
to speak a word;--'We'll go abroad, and you shall get your cousin
Alice to go with us.' That touched me more than anything. Only think
if he had proposed Mrs Marsham!"

"But yet he does not like me."

"You're wrong there, Alice. There has been no question of liking or
of disliking. He thought you would be a kind of Mrs Marsham, and when
you were not, but went out flirting among the ruins with Jeffrey
Palliser, instead--"

"I never went out flirting with Jeffrey Palliser."

"He did with you, which is all the same thing. And when Plantagenet
knew of that,--for, of course, Mr Bott told him--"

"Mr Bott can't see everything."

"Those men do. The worst is, they see more than everything. But, at
any rate, Mr Palliser has got over all that