mostly
does injustice to the life half known.'

'Then since circumstances forbid my knowing you more, I must do my best
to know you less, and elevate my opinion of your nature by forgetting
what it consists in,' he said in a voice from which all feeling was
polished away.

'If I did not know that bitterness had more to do with those words than
judgment, I--should be--bitter too! You never knew half about me; you
only knew me as a governess; you little think what my beginnings were.'

'I have guessed. I have many times told myself that your early life was
superior to your position when I first met you. I think I may say
without presumption that I recognize a lady by birth when I see her, even
under reverses of an extreme kind. And certainly there is this to be
said, that the fact of having been bred in a wealthy home does slightly
redeem an attempt to attain to such a one again.'

Ethelberta smiled a smile of many meanings.

'However, we are wasting words,' he resumed cheerfully. 'It is better
for us to part as we met, and continue to be the strangers that we have
become to each other. I owe you an apology for having been betrayed into
more feeling than I had a right to show, and let us part friends. Good
night, Mrs. Petherwin, and success to you. We may meet again, some day,
I hope.'

'Good night,' she said, extending her hand. He touched it, turned about,
and in a short time nothing remained of him but quick regular brushings
against the heather in the deep broad shadow of the moor.

Ethelberta slowly moved on in the direction that he had pointed out. This
meeting had surprised her in several ways. First, there was the
conjuncture itself; but more than that was the fact that he had not
parted from her with any of the tragic resentment that she had from time
to time imagined for that scene if it ever occurred. Yet there was
really nothing wonderful in this: it is part of the generous nature of a
bachelor to be not indisposed to forgive a portionless sweetheart who, by
marrying elsewhere, has deprived him of the bliss of being obliged to
marry her himself. Ethelberta would have been disappointed quite had
there not been a comforting development of exasperation in the middle
part of his talk; but after all it formed a poor substitute for the
loving hatred she had expected.

When she reached the hotel the lamp over the door showed a face a little
flushed, but the agitation which at first had possesse