when first you went to the
Lewis, and once you had got the bit in your teeth there was no stopping
you. If you seek now to get Sheila back to you, the best thing you can
do, I presume, would be to try to see her as she is, to win her regard
that way, to abandon that operatic business, and learn to know her as a
thoroughly good woman, who has her own ways and notions about things,
and who has a very definite character underlying that extreme gentleness
which she fancies to be one of her duties. The child did her dead best
to accommodate herself to your idea of her, and failed. When she would
rather have been living a brisk and active life in the country or by the
seaside, running wild about a hillside, or reading strange stories in
the evening, or nursing some fisherman's child that had got ill, you had
her dragged into a sort of society with which she had no sympathy
whatever. And the odd thing to me is that you yourself seemed to be
making an effort that way. You did not always devote yourself to
fashionable life. Where are all the old ambitions you used to talk about
in the very chair you are now sitting in?"

"Is there any hope of my getting Sheila back?" he said, looking up at
last. There was a vague and bewildered look in his eyes. He seemed
incapable of thinking of anything but that.

"I don't know," said Ingram. "But one thing is certain: you will never
get her back to repeat the experiment that has just ended in this
desperate way."

"I should not ask that," he said hurriedly--"I should not ask that at
all. If I could but see her for a moment, I would ask her to tell me
everything she wanted, everything she demanded as conditions, and I
would obey her. I will promise to do everything that she wishes."

"If you saw her you could give her nothing but promises," said Ingram.
"Now, what if you were to try to do what you know she wishes, and then
go to her?"

"You mean--" said Lavender, glancing up with another startled look on
his face. "You don't mean that I am to remain away from her a long
time--go into banishment as it were--and then some day come back to
Sheila and beg her to forget all that happened long before?"

"I mean something very like that," said Ingram with composure. "I don't
know that it would be successful. I have no means of ascertaining what
Sheila would think of such a project--whether she would think that she
could ever live with you again."

Lavender seemed fairly stunned by the possib