acquaintance. There is my mother all over! She is your enemy,
remember--not your friend. She is not in search of your merits,
but of your faults. And you wonder why no impression was produced
on her when she heard you addressed by your name! Poor innocent!
I can tell you this--you only discovered my mother in her own
character when I put an end to the mystification by presenting
you to each other. You saw how angry she was, and now you know
why."

I let him go on without saying a word. I listened--oh! with such
a heavy heart, with such a crushing sense of disenchantment and
despair! The idol of my worship, the companion, guide, protector
of my life--had he fallen so low? could he stoop to such
shameless prevarication as this?

Was there one word of truth in all that he had said to me? Yes!
If I had not discovered his mother's portrait, it was certainly
true that I should not have known, not even have vaguely
suspected, who she really was. Apart from this, the rest was
lying, clumsy lying, which said one thing at least for him, that
he was not accustomed to falsehood and deceit. Good Heavens! if
my husband was to be believed, his mother must have tracked us to
London, tracked us to the church, tracked us to the railway
station, tracked us to Ramsgate! To assert that she knew me by
sight as the wife of Eustace, and that she had waited on the
sands and dropped her letter for the express purpose of making
acquaintance with me, was also to assert every one of these
monstrous probabilities to be facts that had actually happened!

I could say no more. I walked by his side in silence, feeling the