_you_ heard of
your aunt's illness too? Did you know she was staying at Ramsgate?"

He made no answer. The landlady, drawing the inevitable inference from
the words that she had just heard, looked from me to my mother-in-law in
a state of amazement, which paralyzed even her tongue. I waited with
my eyes on my husband, to see what he would do. If he had delayed
acknowledging me another moment, the whole future course of my life
might have been altered--I should have despised him.

He did _not_ delay. He came to my side and took my hand.

"Do you know who this is?" he said to his mother.

She answered, looking at me with a courteous bend of her head:

"A lady I met on the beach, Eustace, who kindly restored to me a letter
that I dropped. I think I heard the name" (she turned to the landlady):
"Mrs. Woodville, was it not?"

My husband's fingers unconsciously closed on my hand with a grasp that
hurt me. He set his mother right, it is only just to say, without one
cowardly moment of hesitation.

"Mother," he said to her, very quietly, "this lady is my wife."

She had hitherto kept her seat. She now rose slowly and faced her son in
silence. The first expression of surprise passed from her face. It was
succeeded by the most terrible look of mingled indignation and contempt
that I ever saw in a woman's eyes.

"I pity your wife," she said.

With those words and no more, lifting her hand she waved him back from
her, and went on her way again, as we had first found her, alone.

CHAPTER IV. ON THE WAY HOME.

LEFT by ourselves, there was a moment of silence among us. Eustace spoke
first.

"Are you able to walk back?" he said to me. "Or shall we go on to
Broadstairs, and return to Ramsgate by the railway?"

He put those questions as composedly, so far as his manner was
concerned, as if nothing remarkable had happened. But his eyes and his
lips betrayed him. They told me that he was suffering keenly in secret.
The extraordinary scene that had just passed, far from depriving me of
the last remains of my courage, had strung up my nerves and restored
my self-possession. I must have been more or less than woman if my
self-respect had not been wounded, if my curiosity had not been wrought
to the highest pitch, by the extraordinary conduct of my husband's
mother when Eustace presented me to her. What was the secret of
her despising him, and pitying me? Where was the explanation of her
incomprehensible apathy when my nam