For a minute or more she stood looking at him as he sat with his eyes fixed upon the picture, and while she looked an expression of pity stole across her sweet pale face.

“I wonder what curse there is laid upon us that we should be always doomed to seek what we cannot find?” she said aloud.

He heard her now, and looking up saw her standing in the glow and flicker of the firelight, which played upon her white face and black-draped form.  He started violently; as he did so she loosed the heavy cloak and hood that she wore and it fell behind her.  But where was the lovely rounded form, and where the clustering golden curls?  Gone, and in their place a coarse robe of blue serge, on which hung a crucifix, and the white hood of the nun.

He sprang from his chair with an exclamation, not knowing if he dreamed or if he really saw the woman who stood there like a ghost in the firelight.

“Forgive me, Edward,” she said presently, in her sweet low voice.  “I daresay that this all looks theatrical enough—­but I have put on this dress for two reasons:  firstly, because I must leave this town in an hour’s time and wish to do so unknown; and secondly, to show that you need not fear that I have come to be troublesome.  Will you light the candles?”

He did so mechanically, and then pulled down the blinds.  Meanwhile Belle had seated herself near the table, her face buried in her hands.

“What is the meaning of all this, Belle?” he said.

“‘Sister Agnes,’ you must call me now,” she said, taking her hands from her face.  “The meaning of it is that I have left the world and entered a sisterhood which works among the poor in London, and I have come to bid you farewell, a last farewell.”

He stared at her in amazement.  He did not find it easy to connect the idea of this beautiful, human, loving creature with the cold sanctuary of a sisterhood.  He did not know that natures like this, whose very intensity is often the cause of their destruction, are most capable of these strange developments.  The man or woman who can really love and endure—­and they are rare—­can also, when their passion has utterly broken them, turn to climb the stony paths that lead to love’s antipodes.

“Edward,” she went on, speaking very slowly, “you know in what relation we have stood to each other, and what that relationship means to woman.  You know this—­I have loved you with all my heart, and all my strength, and all my soul——­” Here she trembled and broke down.

“You know, too,” she continued presently, “what has been the end of all this, the shameful end.  I am not come to blame you.  I do not blame you, for the fault was mine, and if I have anything to forgive I forgive it freely.  Whatever memories may still live in my heart I swear I put away all bitterness, and that my most earnest wish is that you may be happy, as happiness is to you.  The sin was mine; that is it would have been mine were we free agents, which perhaps we are not.  I should have loved my husband, or rather the man whom I thought my husband, for with all his faults he was of a different clay to you, Edward.”