More weighty than any one fact, the thing he had said to her on the staircase at Oxford came back to her mind.  ‘If you were a lady,’ he had lisped in smiling insolence, ‘I would kiss you and make you my wife.’  In face of those words, she had been rash enough to think that she could bend him, ignorant that she was more than she seemed, to her purpose.  She had quoted those very words to him when she had had it in her mind to surrender—­the sweetest surrender in the world.  And all the time he had been fooling her to the top of her bent.  All the time he had known who she was and been plotting against her devilishly—­appointing hour and place and—­and it was all over.

It was all over.  The sunny visions of love and joy were done!  It was all over.  When the sharp, fierce pain of the knife had done its worst, the consciousness of that remained a dead weight on her brain.  When the paroxysm of weeping had worn itself out, yet brought no relief to her passionate nature, a kind of apathy succeeded.  She cared nothing where she was or what became of her; the worst had happened, the worst been suffered.  To be betrayed, cruelly, heartlessly, without scruple or care by those we love—­is there a sharper pain than this?  She had suffered that, she was suffering it still.  What did the rest matter?

Mr. Thomasson might have undeceived her, but the sudden stoppage of the chaise had left no place in the tutor’s mind for aught but terror.  At any moment, now the chaise was at a stand, the door might open and he be hauled out to meet the fury of his pupil’s eye, and feel the smart of his brutal whip.  It needed no more to sharpen Mr. Thomasson’s long ears—­his eyes were useless; but for a time crouching in his corner and scarce daring to breathe, he heard only the confused muttering of several men talking at a distance.  Presently the speakers came nearer, he caught the click of flint on steel, and a bright gleam of light entered the chaise through a crack in one of the shutters.  The men had lighted a lamp.

It was only a slender shaft that entered, but it fell athwart the girl’s face and showed him her closed eyes.  She lay back in her corner, her cheeks colourless, an expression of dull, hopeless suffering stamped on her features.  She did not move or open her eyes, and the tutor dared not speak lest his words should be heard outside.  But he looked, having nothing to check him, and looked; and in spite of his fears and his preoccupation, the longer he looked the deeper was the impression which her beauty made on his senses.

He could hear no more of the men’s talk than muttered grumblings plentifully bestrewn with curses; and wonder what was forward and why they remained inactive grew more and more upon him.  At length he rose and applied his eyes to the crack that admitted the light; but he could distinguish nothing outside, the lamp, which was close to the window, blinding him.  At times he caught the clink of a bottle,