Look at her as she stands there, tortured by the knowledge of her own secret—­the hideous secret which she is hiding from the innocent girl, whom she loves with a sister’s love.  Look at her, bowed down under a humiliation which is unutterable in words.  She has seen him below the surface—­now, when it is too late.  She rates him at his true value—­now, when her reputation is at his mercy.  Ask her the question:  What was there to love in a man who can speak to you as that man has spoken, who can treat you as that man is treating you now? you so clever, so cultivated, so refined—­what, in Heaven’s name, could you see in him?  Ask her that, and she will have no answer to give.  She will not even remind you that he was once your model of manly beauty, too—­that you waved your handkerchief till you could wave it no longer, when he took his seat, with the others, in the boat—­that your heart was like to jump out of your bosom, on that later occasion when he leaped the last hurdle at the foot-race, and won it by a head.  In the bitterness of her remorse, she will not even seek for that excuse for herself.  Is there no atoning suffering to be seen here?  Do your sympathies shrink from such a character as this?  Follow her, good friends of virtue, on the pilgrimage that leads, by steep and thorny ways, to the purer atmosphere and the nobler life.  Your fellow-creature, who has sinned and has repented—­you have the authority of the Divine Teacher for it—­is your fellow-creature, purified and ennobled.  A joy among the angels of heaven—­oh, my brothers and sisters of the earth, have I not laid my hand on a fit companion for You?

There was a moment of silence in the summer-house.  The cheerful tumult of the lawn-party was pleasantly audible from the distance.  Outside, the hum of voices, the laughter of girls, the thump of the croquet-mallet against the ball.  Inside, nothing but a woman forcing back the bitter tears of sorrow and shame—­and a man who was tired of her.

She roused herself.  She was her mother’s daughter; and she had a spark of her mother’s spirit.  Her life depended on the issue of that interview.  It was useless—­without father or brother to take her part—­to lose the last chance of appealing to him.  She dashed away the tears—­time enough to cry, is time easily found in a woman’s existence—­she dashed away the tears, and spoke to him again, more gently than she had spoken yet.

“You have been three weeks, Geoffrey, at your brother Julius’s place, not ten miles from here; and you have never once ridden over to see me.  You would not have come to-day, if I had not written to you to insist on it.  Is that the treatment I have deserved?”

She paused.  There was no answer.

“Do you hear me?” she asked, advancing and speaking in louder tones.