Why should she tell it to him?  Of course he asked himself this question.  Then he remembered that she had no brother—­remembered also that her brother-in-law had deserted her, and he declared to himself that, if necessary, he would be her brother.  “I fear that you have not been happy,” said he, “since I saw you last.”

“Happy!” she replied.  “I have lived such a life as I did not think any man or woman could be made to live on this side the grave.  I will be honest with you, Harry.  Nothing but the conviction that it could not be for long has saved me from destroying myself.  I knew that he must die!”

“Oh, Lady Ongar!”

“Yes, indeed; that is the name he gave me; and because I consented to take it from him, he treated me—­O heavens! how am I to find words to tell you what he did, and the way in which he treated me.  A woman could not tell it to a man.  Harry, I have no friend that I trust but you, but to you I cannot tell it.  When he found that he had been wrong in marrying me, that he did not want the thing which he had thought would suit him, that I was a drag upon him rather than a comfort—­what was his mode, do you think, of ridding himself of the burden?” Clavering sat silent looking at her.  Both her hands were now up to her forehead, and her large eyes were gazing at him till he found himself unable to withdraw his own for a moment from her face.  “He strove to get another man to take me off his hands; and when he found he was failing—­he charged me with the guilt which he himself had contrived for me.”

“Lady Ongar!”

“Yes; you may well stare at me.  You may well speak hoarsely and look like that.  It may be that even you will not believe me; but by the God in whom we both believe, I tell you nothing but the truth.  He attempted that and he failed; and then he accused me of the crime which he could not bring me to commit.”

“And what then?”

“Yes; what then?  Harry, I had a thing to do, and a life to live, that would have tried the bravest; but I went through it.  I stuck to him to the last!  He told me before he was dying—­before that last frightful illness, that I was staying with him for his money.  ’For your money, my lord,’ I said, ‘and for my own name.’  And so it was.  Would it have been wise in me, after all that I had gone through, to have given up that for which I had sold myself?  I had been very poor, and had been so placed that poverty, even, such poverty as mine, was a curse to me.  You know what I gave up because I feared that curse.  Was I to be foiled at last, because such a creature as that wanted to shirk out of his bargain?  I knew there would be some who would say I had been false.  Hugh Clavering says so now, I suppose.  But they never should say I had left him to die alone in a foreign land.”

“Did he ask you to leave him?”

“No; but he called me that name which no woman should hear and stay.  No woman should do so unless she had a purpose such as mine.  He wanted back the price he had paid, and I was determined to do nothing that should assist him in his meanness!  And then, Harry, his last illness!  Oh, Harry, you would pity me if you could know all!”