She fell down on her knees before him.

“Kill me!” she cried.  “I am here at your feet—­have mercy and stab me to the heart, but do not drive me mad with your horrible reproaches!  May God forgive me if I have brought dishonor upon you, for I never meant it!  Never—­never—­so help me Heaven!”

“Rise, madame!  Kneel to Him who will judge you for your baseness; it is too late to kneel to me!  Oh, great God! to think how I have loved this woman, and how bitterly she has deceived me!”

The unutterable agony of his tone to her dying day Harriet Kingsland might never forget.

“I loved her and I trusted her!  I would have died to save her one hour of pain, and this is my reward!  Dishonored—­disgraced—­my life blighted—­my heart broken—­deceived from first to last!”

“No, no, no!” she shrieked aloud.  “I swear it to you, Everard!  I am guiltless!  By all my hopes of heaven, I am your true, your faithful, your loving wife!”

He turned and looked up at her in white amaze.  Truth, that no living being could doubt, was stamped in agony on that upturned, beautiful face.

“Hear me, Everard!” she cried—­“my own beloved husband!  I met this man to-night because he holds a secret I am sworn to keep, and that places me in his power.  But, by all that is high and holy, I have told you the simple truth about him!  I never saw him in all my life until I saw him that day in the library.  I have never set eyes on him since, except for an hour to-night.  Oh, believe me, Everard or I shall die here at your feet!”

“And you never wrote to him?” he asked.

“Never—­never!”

“Nor he to you?”

“Once—­the scrawl you saw Sybilla Silver fetch me.  I never wrote—­I never sent him even a message.”

“No?  How, then, came you two to meet to-night?”

“He wished to see me—­to extort money from me for the keeping of this secret—­and he sent word by Sybilla Silver.  My answer was, ’I will be in the Beech Walk at eight tonight.  If he wishes to see me let him come to me there.’”

“Then you own to have deliberately deceived me?  The pretended headache was—­a lie?”

“No; it was true.  It aches still, until I am almost blind with the pain.  Oh, Everard, be merciful!  Have a little pity for me, for I love you, and I am the most wretched creature alive!”

“You show your love in a singular way, my Lady Kingsland.  It is not by keeping guilty secrets from your husband—­by meeting other men by night and by stealth in the grounds—­that you are to convince me of your love.  Tell me what this mystery means.  I command you, by your wifely obedience, tell me this secret at once!”

“I can not!”

“You mean you will not.”

“I can not.”

“It is a secret of guilt and of shame?  Tell me the truth?”

“It is; but the guilt is not mine.  The shame—­the bitter shame—­and the burning expiation, God help me, are!”