"I'll say no more than I need say. A sinner who repents is a fit companion for the angels, and joyfully welcomed. Haven't you read it? I am on your duty, not to God—I pray Him that He may teach you that—but to the honorable man whom you deceived and humiliated. You charge him with having wanted to marry you for your money. Take it on that basis, if you will. What did you want to marry him for? Was it love? No; his title, his position. Was the exchange unfair? The bargain was fair, if not very pretty. Even to that bargain you were grossly false. If I'm wrong in my facts, say so: but if my facts are right, in very decency let his house—let his son—alone."
"Your facts are right," she said. "I was false to the bargain. Have you said all you have to say, Mr. Alison?"
"I have done—save to say that what I have said to you I have said to nobody else. I am no chatterer. What I've said to-day I've said in virtue of my office. What you have admitted to me I treat as told me in the confessional."
She bowed her head slightly, accepting his pledge. "I know that," she said. Then she turned to me, smiling sadly. "I'm afraid we must tell him our plans, Austin—in strict confidence?" She did not wait for an answer, but went on to him immediately: "I'll speak to you on the terms on which you have already heard me—as though I were in the confessional."
"What you are pleased to say is safe—but it's your deeds I want, not your words."
"My words will make my deeds plain to you," she answered, and then sat silent for a while, resting her cheek on her hand, looking very steadily in his face. At last she spoke in a low even voice:
"I don't admit your authority; and yet, as Austin knows, I shrank from this meeting. You claim the right to lay your hands on my very soul, to tear it out and look at it. I don't like that. I resent it. And what good does it do? We remain too far apart. I shall make to you no apology for what I have done; I don't desire to defend myself. The thing is very different to me, and you wouldn't even try to see the difference. Yet it is not less a great thing to me—as great as to you, though different. Yes, a great thing and a decisive one. I may look at it wrongly—I don't look at it lightly."
"I'm glad to be able to think that—at least," he remarked.
"I like you, and I want to work with you in the future. That's why I've listened to you, and why I now tell you what's in my mind—why I have come face to face with you. There was no obligation on me; my soul's my own, not yours, nor the world's. But I have chosen to do it. You came here, Mr. Alison, to tell me that I was not a fit wife for Lord Fillingford's son?"
He assented with a nod and a gentle motion of his hand.