admitted within his doors if he had. We are honest folk we Adairs."
"Indeed!" she says, with a faint sneer; "then deceit must be rechristened."
"Tell him your worst, madam; and to hear you talk about deceit is about as suitable as if the father of lies took to preaching morality. We know nothing here of such womanly accomplishments as spying, forgery, theft; in our part of the world we do not track men for years and marry them when they are mad. Our neighbourhood should be the better for containing a lady who is so great a proficient in all these branches of a woman's education."
"Don't call the means I made use of to reach my ends by such hard names," she says indifferently; "they served me well enough."
"Such ends as they are!" I say quietly; "and such a reward as they have brought you!"
"Yes," she says, with her old slow smile, the smile of my dream, "they have brought me all I wanted. I was his first love, and now I am his wife, and the mother of his son, and you were never anything but his—sweetheart."
"You were his first love," I say slowly—"true; and he cast you aside like a soiled glove when he found out your real nature, nor could you win him back, though you stooped to the dust to bring him. You are his wife—but did you become a wife in any commonly decent, honourable way? And you are the mother of his child. Yes. Does he love that child? Does he ever look upon him without remembering your immodesty, your perjury, your fraud? Trust me, Silvia, that innocent child will never be any link between you; rather is he a chain to drag you farther and farther away from the man you call husband."
"Yes," she says, deadly pale.
