“I remember now,” she continued, without any apparent emotion, and as though he had not spoken.  “When I came into the room you were saying that the child must be considered.  You were both very angry, and I was alarmed—­foolishly alarmed, perhaps.  And my—­and John Charteris said, ’Let him tell, then’—­and you told me—­”

“The truth, Anne.”

“And he sat quietly by.  Oh, if he’d had the grace, the common manliness—!” She shivered here.  “But he never interrupted you.  I—­I was not looking at him.  I was thinking how vile you were.  And when you had ended, he said, ’My dear, I am sorry you should have been involved in this.  But since you are, I think we can assure Rudolph that both of us will regard his confidence as sacred.’  Then I remembered him, and thought how noble he was!  And all those years that were so happy, hour by hour, he was letting you—­meet his bills!” She seemed to wrench out the inadequate metaphor.

You could hear the far-off river, now, faint as the sound of boiling water.

After a few pacings Colonel Musgrave turned upon her.  He spoke with a curious simplicity.

“There isn’t any use in lying to you.  You wouldn’t believe.  You would only go to some one else—­some woman probably,—­who would jump at the chance of telling you everything and a deal more.  Yes, there are a great many ‘they do say’s’ floating about.  This was the only one that came near being—­serious.  The man was very clever.—­Oh, he wasn’t vulgarly lecherous.  He was simply—­Jack Charteris.  He always irritated Lichfield, though, by not taking Lichfield very seriously.  You would hear every by-end of retaliative and sniggered-over mythology, and in your present state of mind you would believe all of them.  I happen to know that a great many of these stories are not true.”

“A great many of these stories,” Anne repeated, “aren’t true!  A great many aren’t!  That ought to be consoling, oughtn’t it?” She spoke without a trace of bitterness.

“I express myself very badly.  What I really mean, what I am aiming at, is that I wish you would let me answer any questions you might like to ask, because I will answer them truthfully.  Very few people would.  You see, you go about the world so like a gray-stone saint who has just stepped down from her niche for the fraction of a second,” he added, as with venom, “that it is only human nature to dislike you.”

Anne was not angry.  It had come to her, quite as though she were considering some other woman, that what the man said was, in a fashion, true.

“There is sunlight and fresh air in the street,” John Charteris had been wont to declare, “and there is a culvert at the corner.  I think it is a mistake for us to emphasize the culvert.”

So he had trained her to disbelieve in its existence.  She saw this now.  It did not matter.  It seemed to her that nothing mattered any more.

“I’ve only one question, I think.  Why did you do it?” She spoke with bright amazement in her eyes.