spite.'

'The connection of that with our present meeting does not appear, unless
it refers to what you have done. It does not refer to me.'

'I am not married: you are.'

She did not contradict him, as she might have done. 'Christopher,' she
said at last, 'this is how it is: you knew too much of me to respect me,
and too little to pity me. A half knowledge of another's life mostly
does injustice to the life half known.'

'Then since circumstances forbid my knowing you more, I must do my best
to know you less, and elevate my opinion of your nature by forgetting
what it consists in,' he said in a voice from which all feeling was
polished away.

'If I did not know that bitterness had more to do with those words than
judgment, I--should be--bitter too! You never knew half about me; you
only knew me as a governess; you little think what my beginnings were.'

'I have guessed. I have many times told myself that your early life was
superior to your position when I first met you. I think I may say
without presumption that I recognize a lady by birth when I see her, even
under reverses of an extreme kind. And certainly there is this to be
said, that the fact of having been bred in a wealthy home does slightly
redeem an attempt to attain to such a one again.'

Ethelberta smiled a smile of many meanings.