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 —I know it is about her! Have you quarrelled in these three weeks?’

‘We have not exactly quarrelled,’ he said. ‘But we have had a difference’

‘Angel—is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?’

With a mother’s instinct Mrs. Clare had put her finger on the kind of trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her son.

‘She is spotless!’ he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie.

‘Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer things in nature than an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of manner which may offend your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure, disappear under the influence of your companionship and tuition.’

Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this marriage, which had not been among his early thoughts after the disclosure. True, on his own account he cared very little about his career; but