It is not by keeping guilty secrets from your husband--by meeting other men by night and by stealth in the grounds--that you are to convince me of your love.

Tell me what this mystery means.

I command you, by your wifely obedience, tell me this secret at once!" "I can not!" "You mean you will not." "I can not." "It is a secret of guilt and of shame?
Tell me the truth ?" "It is; but the guilt is not mine.

The shame--the bitter shame--and the burning expiation, God help me, are!" "And you refuse to tell me ?" "Everard, I have sworn!" she cried out, wildly.

"Would you have me break a death-bed oath ?" "I would have you break ten thousand such oaths," he exclaimed, "when they stand between you and your husband! Harriet Hunsden, your dead father was a villain!" She sprung to her feet--she had been kneeling all this time--and confronted him like a Saxon pythoness.