that he had stumbled upon a painful subject. "I never--"

She paused.

"No," she went on, "I won't say that."

But, so far as conveying what she meant was concerned, she might just as
well have uttered the words.

"I do not want a sympathy which is unmerited," she said gravely.

He turned and looked at her, sitting in a graceful attitude, the
incarnation of a most refined and nineteenth-century misfortune. She
raised her eyes to his for a moment--a sort of photographic
instantaneous shutter, exposing for the hundredth part of a second the
sensitive plate of her heart. Then she suppressed a sigh--badly.

"I was married horribly young," she said, "before I knew what I was
doing. But even if I had known I do not suppose I should have had the
strength of mind to resist my father and mother."

"They forced you into it?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Bamborough. And it is possible that a respectable and
harmless pair of corpses turned in their respective coffins somewhere in
the neighborhood of Norwood.

"I hope there is a special hell reserved for parents who ruin their
daughters' lives to suit their own ambition," said Paul, with a sudden
concentrated heat which rather startled his hearer.