ion.
I kept out of your way, as you must have noticed. All last winter I
fought a hard fight. It would have been harder still if I had guessed
that--you cared! The trouble began in mistaking friendship for love,
but until I met you I was quite content. I had no idea that anything
was lacking."

"And you will be happy again. Rachel is better than I am in every
possible way, and is more worthy of you. I am a selfish, discontented
wretch. If you knew what I was really like, you would wonder how you
could ever have cared for me at all, and when you leave this place it
will be easy to forget--"

"I shall never forget," he said shortly. "Una, I must tell you all that
is in my mind. I believe in honesty in love as in all other matters,
and if circumstances were different I should go straight to Rachel and
tell her. How, unconsciously to myself, my heart had gone out to you,
and that in that supreme moment we turned instinctively to each other,
and I knew that my love was returned, and I would ask her for my
liberty. In nine out of ten cases I am sure that would be the right
thing to do, but--this is the tenth! Rachel has had years of trouble
and anxiety, and now her own health is broken. I could not put another
burden upon her. Through these last days of misery and uncertainty what
has comforted me most has been to realise that she has no idea of what
happened. She must have been taken up with her own thoughts--praying,
no doubt, for our safety, not her own. Rachel never thinks of herself,
so I must think for her. With her father gone, her mother invalided,
she has no one left but me, and I can't desert her."

"I should hate you if you did!" I cried eagerly. "I, too, have been
thankful that she knows nothing, and she must never know, you must never
let her guess. There could be no happiness for us if we broke her
heart. You used to call her the best woman in the world, and she is so
sweet and gentle that you could not possibly live with her and remain
unhappy. In years to come you will be thankful it has happened like
this."

"In any case it is the right thing to do," he said, sighing. "As you
say, we should only suffer if we thought of ourselves first. If one
tries to grasp happiness at the expense of another's suffering it only
collapses like a bubble, and leaves one more wretched than before. You
and I are not unprincipled, Una, though we did forget ourselves for that
one moment, and the rememb