Then there rushed to his memory with a force that sent the blood to his brow and almost took his breath, the conviction that he had a secret from her—­that he was deceiving her—­that it was unmanly to seek her love with a lie on his lips.  For a brief season his engagement had been forgotten, or ignored.  He had hugged to his breast with unreasoning apathy the theory that the present was enough to consider—­that the future must care for itself—­that once his promised wife, Lina Dent should be his if all the world conspired against it.  But now came the hated thought that Evelyn Howard stood between him and the precious one who had been his day-star since the night when he had nursed her back to life.

Starting up, he strode back and forth, not noting the pale cheeks and startled eyes of the girl who watched him in ill-repressed anxiety.

At length, sitting down beside her, he seized her soft fingers with a grasp of which he was hardly aware.  Then instantly relaxing the rigor of his clasp, he pleaded: 

“Let me hold this pure little hand while I confess to you, my only love, that your clear eyes have read my soul—­that I have deceived you—­that I love you beyond all else this world contains; but that the most cruel fate man ever before suffered, keeps me from you, unless, indeed, your love will help me to remove the barrier.”

And while the young girl listened, with drooping head, he told her of his hated engagement—­of the painful circumstances that had betrayed him into compliance.

“But I never dreamed of this sort of Nemesis!  I could not have been in my senses to thus barter my freedom forever.”

Slowly withdrawing her hand, the girl said, still in the same low tones: 

“And you do not love your betrothed?”

“Love her?” he echoed.  “I tell you, Lina, I have never even seen her.  Her people have been abroad for an age.  She was in New York a few weeks ago and, I understand, took offense at my continued absence from her side, and went back to England.  This is what she left for me;” and plunging his hand into his breast pocket he selected from his note-case a fragrant little billet-doux, formally desiring Dr. Gardner to explain his strange conduct at his leisure—­that the next opportunity granted him of seeing Evelyn Howard must be of his own seeking.

There was a pause after the reading of this aggrieved, dignified little message.

“And can you, as a gentleman of honor, reconcile your neglect of the writer?” asked Lina Dent, in a voice in which a cadence of scorn involuntarily sounded.

“Honor!  Can’t you see that honor was what kept me from her?  Such honor as a man feels when he knows that he is poised between a Scylla and a Charybdis of desperate fatality?”

“There can be but one answer to all this, Dr. Gardner,” the girl replied with proud dignity.  “It would ill become me to sit in judgment on you after what I have received at your hands; but you will acknowledge that it was cruelly inconsiderate to seek my love while a barrier such as this existed.  How do I know that you will not love your betrothed after you have seen her?”