Georgian seemed to wonder also, for she gave him a long and piercing look before she spoke.  But once she had begun her story, she forgot to look anywhere but at the man whose forgiveness she sought and for the restoration of whose sympathy she was unconsciously pleading.

Her first words settled one point which up to this moment had disturbed Ransom greatly.

“You must forget Anitra’s story.  It was suggested by facts in my own life, but it was not true of me or mine in any of its particulars.  Nor must you remember what the world knows, or what my relations say about my life.  The open facts tell little of my real history, which from childhood to the day I believed my brother dead was indissolubly bound up in his.  Though our fathers were not the same and he has old-world blood in his veins, while I am of full American stock, we loved each other as dearly and shared each other’s life as intimately as if the bond between us had been one in blood as it was in taste and habit.  This was when we were both young.  Later, a change came.  Some old papers of his father fell into his hands.  A new vision of life,—­sympathies quite remote from those which had hitherto engrossed him, led him further and further into strange ways and among strange companions.  Ignorant of what it all meant, but more alive than ever to his influence, I blindly followed him, receiving his friends as my friends and subscribing to such of their convictions as they thought wise to express before me.  Another year and he and I were living a life apart, owning no individual existence but devoting brain, heart, all we had and all we were, to the advancement and perpetuation of an idea.  I have called this idea the Cause.  Let that name suffice.  I can give you no other.”

Pausing, she waited for some look of comprehension from the man she sought to enlighten.  But he was yet too dazed to respond to her mute appeal, and she was forced to continue without it.  Indicating Hazen with a gesture, she said, with her eyes still fixed on those of her husband: 

“You see him now as he came from under the harrow; but in those days—­I must speak of you as you were, Alfred—­he was a man to draw all eyes and win all hearts.  Men loved him, women adored him.  Little as he cared for our sex, he had but to speak, for the coldest breast to heave, the most indifferent eye to beam.  I felt his power as strong as the rest, only differently.  No woman was more his slave than I, but it was a sister’s devotion I felt, a devotion capable of being supplanted by another.  But I did not know this.  I thought him my whole world and let him engross me in his plans and share his passions for subjects I did not even seek to understand.