“Yes,” he answered, “I do believe it for a reason that I shall give you presently.  But first I want to go though our joint history, very briefly, just to justify myself if you like.  Five-and-twenty years ago, or was it six-and-twenty, I was a boy of eighteen and you were a woman of twenty, a housemaid in my mother’s house, and you made love to me.  Then my mother was called away to nurse my brother who died at school at Portsmouth, and I fell sick with scarlet fever and you nursed me through it—­it would have been kinder if you had poisoned me, and in my weak state you got a great hold over my mind, and I became attached to you, for you were handsome in those days.  Then you dared me to marry you, and partly out of bravado, partly from affection, I took out a licence, to do which I made a false declaration that I was over age, and gave false names of the parishes in which we resided.  Next day, half tipsy and not knowing what I did, I went through the form of marriage with you, and a few days afterwards my mother returned, observed that we were intimate, and dismissed you.  You went without a word as to our marriage, which we both looked on a farce, and for years I lost sight of you.  Fifteen years afterwards, when I had almost forgotten this adventure of my youth, I became acquainted with a young lady with whom I fell in love, and whose fortune, though not large, was enough to help me considerably in my profession as a country lawyer, in which I was doing well.  I thought that you were dead, or that if you lived, the fact of my having made the false declaration of age and locality would be enough to invalidate the marriage, as would certainly have been the case if I had also made a false declaration of names; and my impulses and interests prompting me to take the risk, I married that lady.  Then it was that you hunted me down, and then for the first time I did what I ought to have done before, and took the best legal opinions as to the validity of the former marriage, which, to my horror, I found was undoubtedly a binding one.  You also took opinions and came to the same conclusion.  Since then the history has been a simple one.  Out of my wife’s fortune of ten thousand pounds, I paid you no less than seven thousand as hush money, on your undertaking to leave this country for America, and never return here again.  I should have done better to face it out, but I feared to lose my position and practice.  You left and wrote to me that you too had married in Chicago, but in eighteen months you returned, having squandered every farthing of the money, when I found that the story of your marriage was an impudent lie.”

“Yes,” she put in with a laugh, “and a rare time I had with that seven thousand too.”

“You returned and demanded more blackmail, and I had no choice but to give, and give, and give.  In eleven years you had something over twenty-three thousand pounds from me, and you continually demand more.  I believe you will admit that this is a truthful statement of the case,” and he paused.