The seat was at the terminus of a path in the wildest part of Marguerite’s garden.  Overhead against the trunk of a tree a solitary lantern was flickering fitfully.  It soon went out.  The dazzling lights of the ballroom, glimmering through boughs and vines, shot a few rays into their faces.  Music, languorous, torturing the heart, swelled and died on the air, mingled with the murmurings of eager voices.  Close around them in the darkness was the heavy fragrance of perishing blossoms—­earth dials of yesterday; close around them the clean sweetness of fresh ones—­breath of the coming morn.  It was an hour when the heart, surrounded by what can live no more and by what never before has lived, grows faint and sick with yearnings for its own past and forlorn with the inevitableness of change—­the cruelty of all change.

For a while silence lasted.  He waited for her to speak; she tried repeatedly to do so.  At length with apparent fear that he might misunderstand, she interposed an agitated command: 

“Do not say anything.”

A few minutes later she began to speak to him, still struggling for her self-control.

“I do not forget that to-night I have been acting a part, and that I have asked you to act a part with me.  I have walked with you and I have talked with you, and I am with you now to create an impression that is false; to pretend before those who see us that nothing is changed.  I do not forget that I have been doing this thing which is unworthy of me.  But it is the first time—­try not to believe it to be my character.  I am compelled to tell you that it is one of the humiliations you have forced upon me.”

“I have understood this,” he said hastily, breaking the silence she had imposed upon him.

“Then let it pass,” she cried nervously.  “It is enough that I have been obliged to observe my own hypocrisies, and that I have asked you to countenance and to conceal them.”

He offered no response.  And in a little while she went on: 

“I ought to tell you one thing more.  Last week I made all my arrangements to go away at once, for the summer, for a long time.  I did not expect to see you again.  Two or three times I started to the station.  I have stayed until now because it seemed best after all to speak to you once more.  This is my reason for being here to-night; and it is the only apology I can offer to myself or to you for what I am doing.”

There was a sad and bitter vehemence in her words; she quivered with passion.

“Isabel,” he said more urgently, “there is nothing I am not prepared to tell you.”

When she spoke again, it was with difficulty and everything seemed to hang upon her question: 

“Does any one else know?”

His reply was immediate: 

“No one else knows.”

“Have you every reason to believe this?”

“I have every reason to believe this.”