“Three days ago,” she said quietly, “I submitted and paid three thousand pounds blackmail, rather than that your name and mine, linked together, should be dragged in the mire!”

It was almost as though those white hands of hers had struck him a heavy blow between the eyes.  Hugh sat and stared at her in amaze.

Her words seemed obscure, scarcely possible to understand, yet he had gathered in the sense of them.

“Three days ago I submitted and paid three thousand pounds blackmail rather than your name and mine, linked together, should be dragged in the mire.”

A girl might well shrink to tell a man what she must tell him, to go into explanations that were an offence to the purity of her mind.  Yet, listening to her, looking at her, at the pale, proud young face, white as marble, Hugh Alston knew that he had never admired and reverenced her as he did now.

“The story that you told of our marriage, that lie that I can never understand, passed from lip to lip.  Many have heard it; it has caused many to wonder.  I do not ask why you uttered it.  It does not matter now, nothing matters, save that you did utter it, and it has gone abroad.  Then one day you came to the office where I was employed, and the man who employed me put his private room at your disposal, knowing that by means of some spyhole he had contrived he could hear all that passed between us.  And then you offered me marriage—­by way of atonement.  Do you remember?  You offered to—­to atone by marrying me.”

“In my mad, presumptuous folly, Joan!”

“And it was overheard; the man heard all.  He did not understand—­how should he?  His vile mind grasped at other meanings.  He went down to Marlbury and to Morchester to make enquiries, to look for an entry in a register that was never made.  He went to General Bartholomew and then Cornbridge, where he saw Lady Linden, and heard from her all that she had to tell, and then—­then he came to me.  He told me that he knew the truth, and that if I would marry him he would forgive—­forgive everything!”

Hugh Alston said nothing.  He sat with his big hands gripped hard, and thinking of Philip Slotman a red fury passed like a mist before his eyes.

“I told him to go, and then came a letter from him, a friendly letter, a letter that could not cause him any trouble.  He assured me of his friendship and of his—­silence, you understand, his silence—­and asked me as a friend to lend him three thousand pounds.  It was blackmail—­oh, I knew that.  I hesitated, and did not know what to do.  There was none to whom I could turn—­no one.  I had no friend.  Helen Everard is only a friend of a few short weeks.  I felt that I could not go to her, I felt somehow that she would never understand.  And then—­then at last, because, I suppose, I am a woman and therefore a coward, and because I was so alone—­so helpless—­I sent the money.”

“Oh, that I—­”