affect you merely (whom I cannot at all consider in this business), but your husband, Lady Dedlock, your husband.”

He gets plainer as he gets on, but not an atom more emphatic or animated.

“There is another point of view,” he continues, “in which the case presents itself. Sir Leicester is devoted to you almost to infatuation. He might not be able to overcome that infatuation, even knowing what we know. I am putting an extreme case, but it might be so. If so, it were better that he knew nothing. Better for common sense, better for him, better for me. I must take all this into account, and it combines to render a decision very difficult.”

She stands looking out at the same stars, without a word. They are beginning to pale, and she looks as if their coldness froze her.

“My experience teaches me,” says Mr Tulkinghorn, who has by this time got his hands in his pockets, and is going on in his business consideration of the matter, like a machine. “My experience teaches me, Lady Dedlock, that most of the people I know would do far better to leave marriage alone. It is at the bottom of three fourths of their troubles. So I thought when Sir Leicester married, and so I always have thought since. No more about that. I must now be guided by circumstances. In the meanwhile I must beg you to keep your own counsel, and I will keep mine.”

“I am to drag my present life on, holding its pains at your pleasure, day by day?” she asks, still looking at the distant sky.

“Yes, I am afraid so, Lady Dedlock.”

“It is necessary, you think, that I should be so tied to the stake?”

“I am sure that what I recommend is necessary.”

“I am to remain on this gaudy platform, on which my miserable deception has been so long acted, and it is to fall beneath me when you give the signal?” she says slowly.

“Not without notice, Lady Dedlock. I shall take no step without forewarning you.”

She asks all her questions as if she were repeating them from memory, or calling them over in her sleep.

“We are to meet as usual?”

“Precisely as usual, if you please.”

“And I am to hide my guilt, as I have done so many years?”

“As you have done so many years. I should not have made that reference myself, Lady Dedlock, but I may now remind you that your secret can be no heavier to you than it was, and is no worse and no better than it was. I know it certainly, but I believe we have never wholly trusted each other.”

She stands absorbed in the same frozen way for some little time, before asking:

“Is there anything more to be said to-night?”

“Why,” Mr Tulkinghorn returns methodically, as he softly rubs his hands, “I should like to be assured of your acquiescence in my arrangements, Lady Dedlock.”

“You may be assured of it.”