He saw the
fluttering of her heart beneath her white dress--the crushed, bedraggled
dress, which still in its soft elegance, its small originalities, spoke
Kitty from head to foot. But her manner was quite calm and collected.

"William, we must separate! You must send me away."

He started.

"What do you mean?"

"What I say. It is--it is intolerable--that I should ruin your life like
this."

"Don't, please, exaggerate, Kitty! There is no question of ruin. I shall
make my way when the time comes, and Lady Parham will have nothing to
say to it!"

"No! Nothing will ever go well--while I'm there--like a millstone round
your neck. William"--she came closer to him--"take my advice--do it! I
Warned you when you married me. And now you see--it was true."

"You foolish child," he answered, slowly, "do you think I could forget
you for an hour, wherever you were?"

"Oh yes," she said, steadily, "I know you would forget me--- if I wasn't
here. I'm sure of it. You're very ambitious, William--more than you
know. You'll soon care--"

"More for politics than for you? Another of your delusions, Kitty.
Nothing of the sort. Moreover, if you will only let me advise you--trust
your husband a little--think both for him and yourself. I see nothing
either in politics or in our life together that cannot be retrieved."

He spoke with manly kindness and reasonableness. Not a trace of his
habitual indolence or indifference. Kitty, listening, was conscious of
the most tempestuous medley of feelings--love, remorse, shame, and a
strange gnawing desolation. What else, what better <i>could</i> she have
asked of him? And yet, as she looked at him, she thought suddenly of the
moonlit garden at Grosville Park, and of that young, headlong chivalry
with which he had thrown himself at her feet. This man before her, so
much older and maturer, counting the cost of his marriage with her in
the light of experience, and magnanimously, resolutely paying it--Kitty,
in a flash, realized his personality as she had never yet done, his
moral independence of her, his separateness as a human being. Her
passionate self-love instinctively, unconsciously, had made of his life
the appendage of hers. And now--? His devotion had never been so plain,
so attested; and all the while bitter, terrifying voices rang upon the
inner ear, voices of fate, vague and irrevocable.

She dropped into a chair beside his table, trembling and white.

"No, no," she said, drawing h