“Tom, a man can’t be ‘friends,’ in that sort of way, with a pretty girl of eighteen, when he is going to be married to somebody else.  At least, in my mind, he ought not.”

Tom laughed in a confused manner.  “I say, you’re jealous, and you’d better get over it.”

Was she jealous? was it all fancy, folly?  Did Tom stand there, true as steel, without a feeling in his heart that she did not share, without a hope in which she was not united, holding her, and preferring her, with that individuality and unity of love which true love ever gives and exacts, as it has a right to exact?

Not that poor Elizabeth reasoned in this way, but she felt the thing by instinct without reasoning.

“Tom,” she said, “tell me outright, just as if I was somebody else, and had never belonged to you at all, do you love Esther Martin.”

Truthful people enforce truth.  Tom might be fickle, but he was not deceitful; he could not look into Elizabeth’s eyes and tell her a deliberate lie; somehow he dared not.

“Well, then—­since you will have it out of me—­I think I do.”

So Elizabeth’s “ship went down.”  It might have been a very frail vessel, that nobody in their right senses would have trusted any treasure with, still she did; and it was all she had, and it went down to the bottom like a stone.

It is astonishing how soon the sea closes over this sort of wreck; and how quietly people take—­when they must take, and there is no more disbelieving it—­the truth which they would have given their lives to prove was an impossible lie.

For some minutes Tom stood facing the fire, and Elizabeth sat on her chair opposite without speaking.  Then she took off her brooch, the only love-token he had given her, and put it into his hand.

“What’s this for?” asked he, suddenly.

“You know.  You’d better give it to Esther.  It’s Esther, not me, you must marry now.”

And the thought of Esther, giddy, flirting, useless Esther, as Tom’s wife, was almost more than she could bear.  The sting of it put even into her crushed humility a certain honest self-assertion.

“I’m not going to blame you, Tom; but I think I’m as good as she.  I’m not pretty, I know, nor lively, nor young, at least I’m old for my age; but I was worth something.  You should not have served me so.”

Tom said, the usual excuse, that he “couldn’t help it.”  And suddenly turning round, he begged her to forgive him, and not forsake him.

She forsake Tom!  Elizabeth almost smiled.

“I do forgive you:  I’m not a bit angry with you.  If I ever was I have got over it.”

“That’s right.  You’re a dear soul.  Do you think that I don’t like you, Elizabeth?”

“Oh yes,” she said, sadly, “I dare say you do, a little, in spite of Esther Martin.  But that’s not my way of liking, and I couldn’t stand it.”

“What couldn’t you stand?”