ted to see if you were not made of braver stuff than
other women," said he almost sternly. "In my maddest hours I never
dreamed of speaking, until--what you said last night. Thinking of that
after I came home, I resolved to give you one opportunity to break
through the artificial trammels of your life, and find the freedom you
professed to desire. It was better to do this, I thought, than to be
tormented all my life by a regret, a doubt, lest I had lost happiness
where one bold stroke might have gained it."

"And now that you have found that I am _not_ brave, that I am like all
the other conventional women of my class, are you not sorry that you
have inflicted useless pain upon yourself?"

"Of myself I do not think at all, and even when I think of you I
cannot regret having spoken. Let the misery be what it will, it is
something to have faced it together--it is everything to know that you
love me, though you refuse to share my life."

"You must not say that," said she, starting and shrinking as if from
a blow. "How can I venture to acknowledge that I love you when I am
going to marry Marston Brent?"

"_Are_ you going to marry him?"

"Have I not told you so?"

He turned from her and took one short, quick turn across the square.
Like every man in his position, he felt outraged and indignant,
without pausing to consider how infinitely more inexorable the laws
of society are with regard to women than to men. _He_ could put
Mrs. Lancaster's fortune aside and go his way--to Egypt or to the
dogs--without anybody crying out against his criminal folly, his
criminal disregard of the duties and traditions of his class. But
if Eleanor Milbourne put Marston Brent's princely fortune aside and
disappointed all her friends, what remained to her but the bitter
condemnation of those friends in particular and of society in general?

When he came back she rose to meet him, making a picture worth
remembering as she stood in her graceful youth and picturesque habit
by the broken fountain, with the sombre cedar hedge behind and the
intense azure of the summer sky above.

"Let us go," she said. "By prolonging this we only give ourselves
useless pain. All is said that can be said. Nothing remains now but to
forget; and that can best be done in silence. Victor, let us go."

There was a tone of pathos, a tone as if she was not quite sure of
herself, in those last words, which made Clare refrain from answering
her. He turned silently, a