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250 busy with the music that had just ended. 'I think I knew it the first time I saw you.' Then understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For the first time the past had been invoked.

There was a short silence. Mrs. Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily looked away. Colour began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which he remembered, she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a chair opposite to him.

'That speech of yours will do as well as anything,' she began slowly, looking at the point of her shoe, 'to bring us to what I wanted to say. I asked you here today on purpose, Mr. Trent, because I couldn't bear it any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have been saying to myself that it didn't matter what you thought of me in that affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to others of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of your reasons for suppressing your manuscript. I asked myself how it could matter. But all the time, of course, I knew