"Did you ask him to give you proof?"
"No; because you had already provided me with that."
"How?"
"Surely you must remember telling me that you had ruined one rich man, and might ruin another: that no man could cope with a woman such as you were two or three years ago. There were these things—there were other things—many other things—"
"And that's what you understood from them?"
"I understood nothing whatever. If I thought of such words at all, it was to attribute them to a morbid sensibility. It wasn't until I got their interpretation that they came back to me. It wasn't until I had met some one who knew you before I did, and better than I did—"
"It wasn't till then that you thought of me what no man ever thinks of a woman until he is ready to trample her in the mire, under his feet."
Straightening himself up, as a man who defends his position, he took an argumentative tone.
"What motive would Bienville have for lying?—to a stranger?—and about a stranger? There are moments when you know a man is telling you the truth, as if he were in the confessional. He wasn't speaking of you, but of himself. Not only were no names mentioned, but he had no reason to think I had ever heard of the woman he talked to me about, nor has he yet. If it hadn't been for your own half-hints, your own half-confessions, I doubt if I should ever have had more than a suspicion of—of—the truth."
"I could have explained everything," she said, with a break in her voice. "I've never concealed from you the fact that there was a time in my life when I was very indiscreet. I lived like the women of fashion around me. I was inconsiderate of other people. I did things that were wrong. But before I knew you I had repented of them."