“Oh!  I think you do,” says Margaret; “I think you must see that he——­”

“Let me think it out, Meg,” says Tita, turning a very pale face to hers.  “When he comes tell him I am in the small drawing-room.”

She kisses Margaret and leaves the room.  The basket of flowers, too, she has left behind her.  But Margaret can see that she has taken with her the tiny plant of forget-me-not.

* * * * * *

He comes quickly towards her, holding out his hand.

“Margaret said I should find you here,” says he.  Hope, mingled with great fear, is in his glance.  He holds the hand she gives him.  “Have you kept your promise?” he asks her.  “Have you thought of it?”

“I am tired of thinking,” says she, with a long sigh.

“And your decision?”

“Oh! it shall be as you wish,” cries she, dragging her hand out of his, and walking backwards from him till she reaches the wall, where she stays, leaning against it as if glad of its support, and glancing at him from under her long lashes.  “You shall have your own way.  You have always had it.  You will have it to the end, I suppose.”

“You consent, then!” exclaims her.

“Ah!  That is all you think of.  To save appearances!  You”—­her breath coming quickly—­“you care nothing for what I am feeling——­”

“Don’t wrong me like that,” says Rylton, interrupting her.  “If you could read my heart you would know that it is of you alone I think.  For you I have thought out everything.  You shall be your own mistress——­ I shall not interfere with you in any way.  I ask you to be my wife, so far as entertaining our guests goes, and the arranging of the household, and that——­ No more!  You shall be free as air.  Do you think that I do not know I have sinned towards you?” He breaks off in some agitation, and then goes on.  “I tell you I shall not for one moment even question a wish of yours.”

“I should not like that,” says Tita sadly.  “That would keep me as I was:  always an outsider; a stranger; a guest in my own house.”

Rylton walks to the window and back again.  A stranger! Had she felt like a stranger in her own house?  It hurts him terribly.

“It was I who should have been the stranger,” says he.  “It was all yours—­and yet—­did I really make you so unhappy?”

There is something so cruel in his own condemnation of himself that Tita’s heart melts.

“It is all over,” says she.  “It is at an end.  If”—­with a sad, strange little glance at him—­“we must come together again, let us not begin the new life with recriminations.  Perhaps I have been hard to you—­Margaret says I have—­and if so——­” Tears rise in her eyes and choke her utterance.  She turns aside from him, and drums with her fingers on the table near her.  “I thought those flowers so pretty,” says she.

“I didn’t know what to send,” returns he, in a voice as low as her own.