.

." She sighed--and there was a world of disillusionment in that sigh.
Armand St.Just had allowed her to speak on without interruption: he listened to her, whilst allowing his own thoughts to run riot.

It was terrible to see a young and beautiful woman--a girl in all but name--still standing almost at the threshold of her life, yet bereft of hope, bereft of illusions, bereft of all those golden and fantastic dreams, which should have made her youth one long, perpetual holiday.
Yet perhaps--though he loved his sister dearly--perhaps he understood: he had studied men in many countries, men of all ages, men of every grade of social and intellectual status, and inwardly he understood what Marguerite had left unsaid.

Granted that Percy Blakeney was dull-witted, but in his slow-going mind, there would still be room for that ineradicable pride of a descendant of a long line of English gentlemen.
A Blakeney had died on Bosworth field, another had sacrified life and fortune for the sake of a treacherous Stuart: and that same pride--foolish and prejudiced as the republican Armand would call it--must have been stung to the quick on hearing of the sin which lay at Lady Blakeney's door.

She had been young, misguided, ill-advised perhaps.