She dropped her folded hands into her lap, gazing coolly at him; but there was a glitter in her eyes which arrested his first step toward her.

“I think,” she said, “that you mean my ruin.  Well, we began it long ago, and I doubt if I have anything of infamy to learn, thanks to my thorough schooling as your wife. . . .  But knowledge is not necessarily practice, and it happens that I have not cared to commit the particular indiscretion so fashionable among the friends you have surrounded me with.  I merely mention this for your information, not because I am particularly proud of it.  It is not anything to be proud of, in my case—­it merely happened so; a matter, perhaps of personal taste, perhaps because of lack of opportunity; and there is a remote possibility that belated loyalty to a friend I once betrayed may have kept me personally chaste in this rotting circus circle you have driven me around in, harnessed to your vicious caprice, dragging the weight of your corruption—­”

She laughed.  “I had no idea that I could be so eloquent, Jack.  But my mind has become curiously clear during the last year—­strangely and unusually limpid and precise.  Why, my poor friend, every plot of yours and of your friends—­every underhand attempt to discredit and injure me has been perfectly apparent to me.  You supposed that my headaches, my outbursts of anger, my wretched nights, passed in tears—­and the long, long days spent kneeling in the ashes of dead memories—­all these you supposed had weakened—­perhaps unsettled—­my mind. . . .  You lie if you deny it, for you have had doctors watching me for months. . . .  You didn’t know I was aware of it, did you?  But I was, and I am. . . .  And you told them that my father died of—­of brain trouble, you coward!”

Still he stood there, jaw loose, gazing at her as though fascinated; and she smiled and settled deeper in her chair, framing the gilded foliations of the back with her beautiful arms.

“We might as well understand one another now,” she said languidly.  “If you mean to get rid of me, there is no use in attempting to couple my name with that of any man; first, because it is untrue, and you not only know it, but you know you can’t prove it.  There remains the cowardly method you have been nerving yourself to attempt, never dreaming that I was aware of your purpose.”

A soft, triumphant little laugh escaped her.  There was something almost childish in her delight at outwitting him, and, very slowly, into his worn and faded eyes a new expression began to dawn—­the flickering stare of suspicion.  And in it the purely personal impression of rage and necessity of vengeance subsided; he eyed her intently, curiously, and with a cool persistence which finally began to irritate her.

“What a credulous fool you are,” she said, “to build your hopes of a separation on any possible mental disability of mine.”

He stood a moment without answering, then quietly seated himself.  The suspicious glimmer in his faded eyes had become the concentration of a curiosity almost apprehensive.