“Some time subsequent to your departure,” she quietly went on, “one of the maids was setting to rights the clothes in your dressing-closet, and she brought me a letter she found in one of the pockets.  I saw by the date that it was one of those two which you received on the morning of your departure.  It contained the information that the divorce was pronounced.”

She spoke so quietly, so apparently without feeling or passion, that Sir Francis was agreeably astonished.  He should have less trouble in throwing off the mask.  But he was an ill-tempered man; and to hear that the letter had been found to have the falseness of his fine protestations and promises laid bare, did not improve his temper now.  Lady Isabel continued,—­

“It would have been better to have undeceived me then; to have told me that the hopes I was cherishing for the sake of the unborn child were worse than vain.”

“I did not judge so,” he replied.  “The excited state you then appeared to be in, would have precluded your listening to any sort of reason.”

Her heart beat a little quicker; but she stilled it.

“You deem that it was not in reason that I should aspire to be the wife of Sir Francis Levison?”

He rose and began kicking at the logs; with the heel of his boot this time.

“Well, Isabel, you must be aware that it is an awful sacrifice for a man in my position to marry a divorced woman.”

The hectic flushed into her thin cheeks, but her voice sounded calm as before.

“When I expected or wished, for the ‘sacrifice,’ it was not for my own sake; I told you so then.  But it was not made; and the child’s inheritance is that of sin and shame.  There he lies.”

Sir Francis half turned to where she pointed, and saw an infant’s cradle by the side of the bed.  He did not take the trouble to look at it.

“I am the representative now of an ancient and respected baronetcy,” he resumed, in a tone as of apology for his previous heartless words, “and to make you my wife would so offend all my family, that—­”

“Stay,” interrupted Lady Isabel, “you need not trouble yourself to find needless excuses.  Had you taken this journey for the purpose of making me your wife, were you to propose to do so this day, and bring a clergyman into the room to perform the ceremony, it would be futile.  The injury to the child can never be repaired; and, for myself, I cannot imagine any fate in life worse than being compelled to pass it with you.”

“If you have taken this aversion to me, it cannot be helped,” he coldly said, inwardly congratulating himself, let us not doubt, at being spared the work of trouble he had anticipated.  “You made commotion enough once about me making you reparation.”

She shook her head.

“All the reparation in your power to make—­all the reparation that the whole world can invent could not undo my sin.  It and the effects must lie upon me forever.”