“You have,” she continued, “paid for a hundred other things besides Savelli’s lessons and the house in the Rue Balzac, but it would be impossible to make out a correct account, I feel, too, that you gave me the greatest part of my jewellery thinking that one day I would be your wife; you would not have given me so much if you had not thought so.  Therefore I feel it is only just to offer you the whole of it back.  I will only ask you to allow me to keep a few trifles—­the earrings you bought for me the day we arrived in Paris, the mummy’s ring, etc., not more than half-a-dozen things in all.  I should like to keep these in memory of a time which I ought to forget, but which I am afraid I shall never have the courage even to try to forget.  Dear Owen, I cannot tell you why I cannot marry you, I only know that I cannot.  I am obeying an instinct far stronger than I, and I cannot struggle against it any longer.

“One day perhaps we may meet—­but it may not be for years, until we are both quite different.

“Sincerely yours,

“EVELYN INNES.”

The moment she had written the address, she threw the pen aside, and she sat striving against an uncontrollable sense of misery.  At last her pent-up tears ran over her eyelids.  She flung herself on her bed, and lay weeping, shaken by short, choking sobs.  All her courage of the morning had forsaken her; she could not face her new life, she could not send away Owen.  Her inmost life rose in revolt.  Why was this new sacrifice demanded of her?  Why was her life to be made so hard, so impossible for her to endure?  She felt she could not live in the life which she foresaw awaited her.  Then she felt that she was being tried beyond the endurance of any woman.  But the storm did not last, her sobs died away.  She sat up, mopping her eyes with a soaking pocket handkerchief, and utterly exhausted by the violence of her emotions, she began to undress.  She felt the impossibility of saying her prayers, her one longing was for sleep, oblivion; she wished herself dead, and was too worn out to put the thought from her, though she knew it was wrong.

In the morning the first thing she saw was the letter to Owen.  There it was!  And every word and letter sank into her brain.  “Sir Owen Asher, Bart., Riversdale, Northamptonshire.”  She would have to post it, and never again would she see him.  She questioned the right of the priest in obtaining from her a promise not to see him, so long as she did not sin.  But Owen was an approximate cause of mortal sin....

Ashamed of her instability, and feeling herself unworthy and no longer pure as absolution had made her, she went that afternoon to St. Joseph’s, and in confession laid the matter before Monsignor Mostyn.  Regarding the money question, he approved of what she had written to Sir Owen, and he was far more indulgent regarding her breakdown than she had dared to hope.  He had expected some such mental crisis.  It was