The Story Continued by Marian Halcombe

required of me, if it will affect no one else, and lead to no ill results⁠—” “Who talked of a sacrifice being required of you?” he broke in, with a half-suppressed return of his former violence. “I only meant,” she resumed, “that I would refuse no concession which I could honourably make. If I have a scruple about signing my name to an engagement of which I know nothing, why should you visit it on me so severely? It is rather hard, I think, to treat Count Fosco’s scruples so much more indulgently than you have treated mine.” This unfortunate, yet most natural, reference to the Count’s extraordinary power over her husband, indirect as it was, set Sir Percival’s smouldering temper on fire again in an instant. “Scruples!” he repeated. “ Your scruples! It is rather late in the day for you to be scrupulous. I should have thought you had got over all weakness of that sort, when you made a virtue of necessity by marrying me .” The instant he spoke those words, Laura threw down the pen⁠—looked at him with an expression in her eyes which, throughout all my experience of her, I had never seen in them before, and turned her back on him in dead silence. This strong expression of the most open and the most bitter contempt was so entirely unlike herself, so utterly out of her character, that it silenced us all. There was something hidden, beyond a doubt, under the mere