off your engagement to me. Do you care so little
as all that, Luke?"

He did not reply, but continued to walk beside her, just a yard or so
apart from her, turning his steps in the direction of the gates,
toward the Albert Bridge, their nearest way home. She--meekly now, for
already she was sorry--turned to look at him. Something in his
attitude, the stoop of the shoulders, usually so square and erect,
the hands curiously clasped behind his back, told her that her
shaft--very thoughtlessly aimed--had struck even deeper than it
should.

"I am so sorry, dear," she said gently.

His look forgave her, even before the words were fully out of her
mouth, but with characteristic reticence, he made no reply to her
taunt. Strangely enough she was satisfied that he should say nothing.
The look, which did not reproach even whilst it tried to conceal the
infinite depth of the wound so lightly dealt, had told her more than
any words could do. Whatever Luke decided to do, it would be from a
sense of moral obligation, that desire for doing the right thing--in
the worldly sense of the term--which is inherent in Englishmen of a
certain class. No sentiment save that of a conventional one of honour
would be allowed to sway her destiny and his.

Conventionality--that same strained sense of honour and duty--decreed
that under certain mundane circumstances a man and woman should not
mate. Differences of ancestry, of parentage, of birth and of country,
divergence of taste, of faith, of belief--all these matter not one
jot. But let the man be beggared and the woman rich, and convention
steps in and says, "It shall not be!"

These two bowed to that decree: unconventional, in so far that they
both made the sacrifice out of the intense purity of their sentiment
to one another. They made an absolutely worldly sacrifice for a wholly
unworldly motive. Luke would as soon have thought of seeing Louisa in
a badly fitting serge frock, and paying twopence for a two-mile ride
in an omnibus, as he would expect to see a diamond tiara packed in a
card-board box, it would be unfair on the jeweller who had made the
tiara thus to subject it to rough treatment; and it would be equally
unfair on the Creator of Louisa to let her be buffeted about by the
cruder atoms of this world.

Louisa only thought of Luke and that perhaps he would feel happier in
his mind if she allowed him to make this temporary sacrifice.

There is such wonderful balm in self-impose