advanced a few steps towards the place where she
was sitting.

She started violently, and a faint cry of surprise escaped her. Every
word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and truth to a
man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a pure and true
woman. Her own noble conduct had been the hidden enemy, throughout, of
all the hopes she had trusted to it. I had dreaded this from the
first. I would have prevented it, if she had allowed me the smallest
chance of doing so. I even waited and watched now, when the harm was
done, for a word from Sir Percival that would give me the opportunity
of putting him in the wrong.

"You have left it to ME, Miss Fairlie, to resign you," he continued.
"I am not heartless enough to resign a woman who has just shown herself
to be the noblest of her sex."

He spoke with such warmth and feeling, with such passionate enthusiasm,
and yet with such perfect delicacy, that she raised her head, flushed
up a little, and looked at him with sudden animation and spirit.

"No!" she said firmly. "The most wretched of her sex, if she must give
herself in marriage when she cannot give her love."

"May she not give it in the future," he asked, "if the one object of
her husband's life is to deserve it?"

"Never!" she answered. "If you still persist in maintaining our
engagement, I may be your true and faithful wife, Sir Percival--your
loving wife, if I know my own heart, never!"

She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that
no man alive could have steeled his heart against her. I tried hard to
feel that Sir Percival was to blame, and to say so, but my womanhood
would pity him, in spite of myself.

"I gratefully accept your faith and truth," he said. "The least that
you can offer is more to me than the utmost that I could hope for from
any other woman in the world."

Her left hand still held mine, but her right hand hung listlessly at
her side. He raised it gently to his lips--touched it with them,
rather than kissed it--bowed to me--and then, with perfect delicacy and
discretion, silently quitted the room.

She neither moved nor said a word when he was gone--she sat by me, cold
and still, with her eyes fixed on the ground. I saw it was hopeless
and useless to speak, and I only put my arm round her, and held her to
me in silence. We remained together so for what seemed a long and
weary time--so long and so weary, that I grew uneasy and s