And that he should marry Lady Beverley, a thoroughly commonplace woman hung round with the money her late husband had bequeathed her, Maryon’s very antithesis in all that pertained to the beautiful—­this sickened her.  It seemed to her as though he were yielding his birthright in exchange for a mess of pottage.

Where was his self-respect that he could do this thing?  The high courage of the artist to conquer single-handed?  Not only had he trampled on the love which he professed to have borne her—­and which, in her innermost heart, she knew he had borne her—­but he was trampling on everything else in life that mattered.  She felt that his projected marriage with Lady Beverley was like the sale of a soul.

When lunch was over, the whole party adjourned to the terrace for coffee, and as soon as she decently could after the performance of this sacred rite, Nan escaped into the rose-garden by herself, there to wrestle with the thoughts to which Ralph’s carelessly uttered news had given rise.

They were rather bitter thoughts.  She was aware of an odd sense of loss, for whatever may have come between them, no woman ever quite believes that the man who has once loved her will eventually marry some other woman.  Whether it happens early or late, it is always somewhat of a shock.  These marriages deal such a blow at faith in the deathlessness of love, and whether the woman herself is married or not, there remains always a secret and very tender corner in her heart for the man who, having loved her unavailingly, has still found no other to take her place even twenty or thirty years later.

Nan was conscious of an unspeakably deserted feeling.  Maryon had gone completely out of her life; Peter, the man she loved, could never come into it; and the only man who strove for entrance was, as Penelope had said, the last man in the world to make her happy.

Nevertheless, it seemed as though with gentle taps and pushes Fate were urging them together—­forcing her towards Roger so that she might escape from forbidden love and the desperate fear and pain of it.

And then she saw him coming—­it seemed almost as though her thought had drawn him—­coming with swift feet over the grassy slopes of the park, too eager to follow the winding carriage-way, while the fallow-deer bounded lightly aside at the sound of his footsteps, halting at a safe distance to regard the intruder with big, timorous, velvety eyes.

Nan paused in the middle of the rose-garden, where a stone sundial stood—­grey and weather-beaten, its warning motto half obliterated by the tender touches of the years: 

  “Time flies.  Remember that each breath
  But wafts thy erring spirit nearer death.”

Rather nervously, while she waited for Trenby to join her, she traced the ancient lettering with a slim forefinger.  He crossed the lawn rapidly, pausing beside her, and without looking up she read aloud the grim couplet graven round the dial.