A Fair Fraud — page 229: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

218 A Fair Fraud ment in the mind of everybody present. She became at once the centre of attraction, and they all looked at her eagerly; only Kenneth Drury stood apart, leaning against the wall with folded arms and averted eyes, and he said to himself bitterly, — ‘She has come to own her connection with this wretched fellow—to confess her shame! to lower herself in the eyes of every decent man present. Ah! for my sake, she might have kept silence!’ He was convinced that wh:t he was about to listen to would be an utter stripping off of his last illusions about her. Why could she not hold her peace? What good could she do by her unseemly confessions? And in the name of all that was good and womanly, what was little Marion about in bringing her into this placc, and in backing her up in her shameless resolution? Marion at Jeast was good and true. Surely she could not know or unders‘and? For in the bitterness of his heart he told himself that Hester Lane loved this dead man for whom she had found the courage to beg for money of a rejected suitor, and that it was because of her love that she was here to own him. Her pallor—her avitation—the tears which he could see upon her cheeks—all seemed to the jealous man to point but to one thing. GORMGIOO