“My dear Evelyn! my dear Evelyn!”

“You don’t understand, Owen; I am so different from what I was once.  I know it, I feel it, the difference, and it can’t be helped.”

“But it can be helped, Evelyn.  You’ve been living by yourself, spending whole days and nights alone, and you’ve been suffering from want of sleep—­something had to happen; but now that it has happened you will get quite well, and if you had only done what I asked you before—­if we had been married—­I”

“Don’t let us talk about it, Owen; you don’t understand how different I am, how impossible—­I—­don’t want to be unkind, you have been very good to me always; and, understanding you as I seem to understand you now, I am sorry you should have made such a bad choice, and that I was not more satisfactory.”

“But you are perfectly satisfactory, Evelyn.  If I am satisfied, who should have the right to grumble?  The pain of losing you is better than the pleasure of winning anybody else....  So you think, Evelyn, you will never return to the stage?”

She did not answer, and, with dilated eyes, she looked through the room till Owen turned, wondering if he should see anything; and he was about to ask her if she saw the shadow again which she had spoken of a while ago, but refrained from speaking, seeing that the time was not one for questions.

“Evelyn,” he said, “I will come to see you to-morrow.  You are tired to-night.”

XV

“She will fall asleep again, and to-morrow will be quite well.  But what a near escape!” And he lingered with Merat, feeling it were better she should know everything, yet loth to tell her that he had known all the while that Ulick was trying to persuade Evelyn to go away with him.  But Merat must know that Ulick had been staying at Berkeley Square.

“I suppose Monsignor comes here to see her?”

“He has been here, Sir Owen.”

Owen would have liked to question her, but it did not seem honourable to do so, and after a little talk about the danger of yielding to religious impulses, he noticed that Merat was drifting from him, evidently thinking such discussions useless.

On the landing he told her that Ulick had gone away with the opera company, and that it was not likely that he and mademoiselle would see each other again.

“But when Mr. Dean comes back to London?” Merat answered.

“Well, hardly even then; after a crisis like this she will not be anxious to see him.  You know, Merat, he was staying with me at Berkeley Square; and I knew of his visits here, only it seemed to me the only way to save her from religion was by getting her to go back to the stage.”

Owen took breath; he had told his story, or as much as was necessary, omitting the fact that he was an accomplice in the love-making which had led to attempted suicide.

“You don’t think I was right?”