“The greatest right on earth,” he said. “Joan, how can I help you?”
But she did not answer immediately, for the answer would be difficult.
“When you played with a woman’s name,” she said, “you played with the most fragile, the most delicate and easily breakable thing there is. Do you realise that? A woman’s fair name is her most sacred possession, and yet you played with mine, used it for your own purpose, and so have brought me to shame and misery.”
“Joan,” he leaned towards her, “how—how—tell me how?”
“Three days ago,” she said quietly, “I submitted and paid three thousand pounds blackmail, rather than that your name and mine, linked together, should be dragged in the mire!”
It was almost as though those white hands of hers had struck him a heavy blow between the eyes. Hugh sat and stared at her in amaze.
Her words seemed obscure, scarcely possible to understand, yet he had gathered in the sense of them.
“Three days ago I submitted and paid three thousand pounds blackmail rather than your name and mine, linked together, should be dragged in the mire.”
A girl might well shrink to tell a man what she must tell him, to go into explanations that were an offence to the purity of her mind. Yet, listening to her, looking at her, at the pale, proud young face, white as marble, Hugh Alston knew that he had never admired and reverenced her as he did now.
“The story that you told of our marriage, that lie that I can never understand, passed from lip to lip. Many have heard it; it has caused many to wonder. I do not ask why you uttered it. It does not matter now, nothing matters, save that you did utter it, and it has gone abroad. Then one day you came to the office where I was employed, and the man who employed me put his private room at your disposal, knowing that by means of some spyhole he had contrived he could hear all that passed between us. And then you offered me marriage—by way of atonement. Do you remember? You offered to—to atone by marrying me.”