Camilla waved aside the interruptions, and continued: '"Now," he said,
"will you marry me? Will you marry me now?"'

She paused and glanced at Hugo, who observed that her eyes were filling
with tears.

'And then?' murmured Hugo soothingly.

'Then I agreed to marry him.'

And with these words she cried openly.

'If anyone had told me beforehand,' she resumed, 'that I should be so
influenced by a man's--a man's acting, I would have laughed. But I
was--I was. He succeeded completely.'

'You have not said what these extraordinary statements were,' Hugo
insisted.

'Don't ask me,' she entreated, drying her eyes. 'It is enough that I was
hoodwinked. If you have had no hand in this plot, don't ask me. I am too
ashamed, too scornful of my credulity, to repeat them. You would laugh.'

'Should I?' said Hugo, smiling gravely. 'What occurred next?'

'The next step was that Mr. Tudor asked me to accompany his housekeeper
to the housekeeper's room, and on the other side of the passage from the
drawing-room I was to dine with him. The housekeeper is a Mrs. Dant, a
kind, fat, lame old woman, and she produced this cloak and this hat, and
so on, and said that they were for me! I was surprised, but I praised