They alighted at the gate of the Temple, and, as they walked across the quadrangle under a sky still heavy with storm-clouds, Madame de Chateauvieux said to her brother with a sigh:  ’Well, it has been a great event.  I never remember anything more exciting, or more successful.  But there is one thing, I think, that would make me happier than a hundred Elviras, and that is to see Isabel Bretherton the wife of a man she loved!’ Then a smile broke over her face as she looked at her brother.

’Do you know, Eustace, I quite made up my mind from those first letters of yours in May, in spite of your denials, that you were very deeply taken with her?  I remember quite seriously discussing the pros and cons of it with myself.’

The words were said so lightly, they betrayed so clearly the speaker’s conviction that she had made a foolish mistake, that they stung Kendal to the quick.  How could Marie have known?  Had not his letters for the last three months been misleading enough to deceive the sharpest eyes?  And yet he felt unreasonably that she ought to have known—­there was a blind clamour in him against the bluntness of her sisterly perception.

His silence was so prolonged that Madame de Chateauvieux was startled by it.  She slipped her hand into his arm.  ‘Eustace!’ Still no answer.  ’Have I said anything to annoy you—­Eustace?  Won’t you let your old sister have her dreams?’

But still it seemed impossible for him to speak.  He could only lay his hand over hers with a brotherly clasp.  By this time they were at the foot of the stairs, and he led the way up, Madame de Chateauvieux following in a tumult of anxious conjecture.  When they reached his rooms he put her carefully into a chair by the fire, made her take some sandwiches, and set the kettle to boil in his handy bachelor way, that he might make her some tea, and all the time he talked about various nothings, till at last Marie, unable to put up with it any longer, caught his hand as he was bending over the fire.

‘Eustace,’ she exclaimed, ’be kind to me, and don’t perplex me like this.—­Oh, my poor old boy, are you in love with Isabel Bretherton?’

’He drew himself to his full height on the rug, and gazed steadily into the fire, the lines of his mobile face settling into repose.

‘Yes,’ he said, as though to himself; ’I love her.  I believe I have loved her from the first moment.’

Madame de Chateauvieux was tremblingly silent, her thoughts travelling back over the past with lightning rapidity.  Could she remember one word, one look of Isabel Bretherton’s, of which her memory might serve to throw the smallest ray of light on this darkness in which Eustace seemed to be standing?  No, not one.  Gratitude, friendship, esteem—­all these had been there abundantly, but nothing else, not one of those many signs by which one woman betrays her love to another!  She rose and put her arm round her brother’s neck.  They had been so much to one another for nearly forty years; he had never wanted anything as a child or youth that she had not tried to get for him.  How strange, how intolerable, that this toy, this boon, was beyond her getting!