“When you married me——”
Her little hand flashed out across the table.
“John,” she said, “I can spare you that question. I had been about as foolish and selfish as a girl could be. I had done the most compromising things, and behaved in the most ridiculous way. But from the rest—you saved me.”
Sir John breathed a long deep sigh. He sat up in his chair again, the colour came back to his cheeks.
“John, don’t!” she cried. “You think that this is all. You are going to be generous and forgive. It isn’t all. There is worse to come. There is a tragedy to come.”
“Out with it, then,” he cried, almost roughly. “Don’t you know, child, that this is torture for me? What in God’s name more can you have to tell me?”
Her face had become almost like a marble image. She spoke with a certain odd deliberation carefully chosen words which fell like drops of ice upon the man who sat listening.
“Before I met you I was deluded into receiving upon friendly terms a man named Hill, who passed himself off as Meysey Hill the railway man, but who was in reality an Englishman in poor circumstances. He was going to settle I forget how many millions upon me, and I think that I was dazzled. I went with him to what I supposed to be the British Embassy, and went through a ceremony which I understood to be the usual form of the marriage one used there. Afterwards we started for a motor ride to a place outside Paris for déjeuner, and I suppose the man’s nerve failed him. I questioned him too closely about his possessions, and remarked upon the fact that he was a most inexpert driver, although Meysey Hill had a great reputation as a motorist. Anyhow he confessed that he was a fraud. I struck him across the face, jumped out and went back by train to Paris. He lost control of the machine, was upset and nearly killed.”
“Did you say,” Sir John asked, “that the man’s name was Hill?”