tude in that
way, if I can prove it in no other."

"You have proved it already," she answered, "by those words. Mr.
Hartright, concealment is at an end between us. I cannot affect to
hide from you what my sister has unconsciously shown to me. You must
leave us for her sake, as well as for your own. Your presence here,
your necessary intimacy with us, harmless as it has been, God knows, in
all other respects, has unsteadied her and made her wretched. I, who
love her better than my own life--I, who have learnt to believe in that
pure, noble, innocent nature as I believe in my religion--know but too
well the secret misery of self-reproach that she has been suffering
since the first shadow of a feeling disloyal to her marriage engagement
entered her heart in spite of her. I don't say--it would be useless to
attempt to say it after what has happened--that her engagement has ever
had a strong hold on her affections. It is an engagement of honour,
not of love; her father sanctioned it on his deathbed, two years since;
she herself neither welcomed it nor shrank from it--she was content to
make it. Till you came here she was in the position of hundreds of
other women, who marry men without being greatly attracted to them or
greatly repelled by them, and who learn to love them (when they don't
learn to hate!) after marriage, instead of before. I hope more
earnestly than words can say--and you should have the self-sacrificing
courage to hope too--that the new thoughts and feelings which have
disturbed the old calmness and the old content have not taken root too
deeply to be ever removed. Your absence (if I had less belief in your
honour, and your courage, and your sense, I should not trust to them as
I am trusting now) your absence will help my efforts, and time will
help us all three. It is something to know that my first confidence in
you was not all misplaced. It is something to know that you will not
be less honest, less manly, less considerate towards the pupil whose
relation to yourself you have had the misfortune to forget, than
towards the stranger and the outcast whose appeal to you was not made
in vain."

Again the chance reference to the woman in white! Was there no
possibility of speaking of Miss Fairlie and of me without raising the
memory of Anne Catherick, and setting her between us like a fatality
that it was hopeless to avoid?

"Tell me what apology I can make to Mr. Fairlie for breaking my
engagement