ooped in
shame. The silence which followed--May was saying to herself that now,
now the moment had come did but increase his embarrassment. He wished
to speak of his sisters, to hint at their circumstances, but the thing
was impossible. In desperation, he broke into some wholly foreign
subject, and for this morning, all hope of the decisive step had passed.

The day brought no other opportunity. Towards midnight, Dymchurch sat
at the open window of his chamber, glad to be alone, anxious,
self-reproachful. To-morrow he must discharge what had become an
obvious duty, however difficult it might be.

He had received a long letter from the younger of his sisters. It spoke
of the other's ill health, a subject of disquiet for the past month,
and went on to discuss a topic which frequently arose in this
correspondence the authority of the Church of Rome. A lady who had just
been passing a fortnight at the house in Somerset was a Catholic, and
Dymchurch suspected her of proselytism; from the tone of the present
letter it appeared that her arguments had had considerable success.
Though impartial in his judgment of the old faith, Dymchurch felt
annoyed and depressed at the thought that one of his sisters, or both,
might turn in that direction; he explained their religious unrest by
the solitude and monotony of their lives, for which it seemed to him
that he himself was largely to blame. Were he to marry May Tomalin,
everything would at once, he thought, be changed for the better; his
sisters might come forth from their seclusion, mingle with wholesome
society, and have done with more or less morbid speculation.

He had gone so far that honour left him no alternative. And he had gone
thus far because it pleased him to do a thing which broke utterly with
his habits and prejudices, which put him into a position such as he had
never foreseen. He was experimenting in life.

May, he told himself, behaved very well. Never for a moment had she
worn the air of invitation; a smirk was a thing unknown to her; the
fact of his titular dignity she seemed wholly to disregard. Whatever
her faults he saw most of them--she had the great virtue of
unaffectedness. Assuredly he liked her; he could not feel certain that
even a warmer sentiment had not begun to breathe within him. As for
May's willingness to marry him, why, at all events, it appeared a
probability. They had some intellectual sympathies, which were likely
to increase rather than dimi