‘Go on, go on, I beg,’ he urged, with a gesture of apology.

’Naturally, I declined the invitation.  Then next I received a letter from him, in which he said that unless I called on him, or agreed to meet him in some place where we could talk privately and at length, he should kill himself within a week.  And he added that death was perhaps less to him than I imagined.  I believed that letter.  There was something about it that touched me.’

‘And so you decided to yield?’

’I did yield.  I felt that if I was to trust him at all, I might as well trust him fully, and I called at his flat this afternoon alone.  He was evidently astonished to see me at that hour, so I explained to him that you had closed early for some reason or other.’

‘Exactly,’ said Hugo.

He insisted on giving me tea.  I was treated, in fact, like a princess; but during tea he said nothing to me that might not have been said before a roomful of people.  After tea he left me for a few moments, in order, as he said, to give some orders to his servants.  Up till then he had been extremely agitated, and when he returned he was even more agitated.  He walked to and fro in that lovely drawing-room of his—­just as you were doing here not long since.  I was a little afraid.’

‘Afraid of what?’ demanded Hugo.

’I don’t know—­of him, lest he might do something fatal, irretrievable; something—­I don’t know.  And then, being alone with him in that palace of a place!  Well, he burst out suddenly into a series of statements about himself, and about his future, and his intentions, and his feelings towards me.  And these statements were so extraordinary and so startling that I could not think he had invented them.  I believed them, as I had believed in the sincerity of his threat to kill himself if I would not listen to him.’

‘And what were they—­these statements?’ Hugo inquired.

Camilla waved aside the interruptions, and continued:  ’"Now,” he said, “will you marry me?  Will you marry me now?"’

She paused and glanced at Hugo, who observed that her eyes were filling with tears.

‘And then?’ murmured Hugo soothingly.

‘Then I agreed to marry him.’

And with these words she cried openly.

‘If anyone had told me beforehand,’ she resumed, ’that I should be so influenced by a man’s—­a man’s acting, I would have laughed.  But I was—­I was.  He succeeded completely.’

‘You have not said what these extraordinary statements were,’ Hugo insisted.

‘Don’t ask me,’ she entreated, drying her eyes.  ’It is enough that I was hoodwinked.  If you have had no hand in this plot, don’t ask me.  I am too ashamed, too scornful of my credulity, to repeat them.  You would laugh.’

‘Should I?’ said Hugo, smiling gravely.  ‘What occurred next?’