“The rest which I deserve,” Mannering answered, bitterly, “is the rest of those whose bones are bleaching amongst the caves and corals of the sea there!  That is Matapan Point, isn’t it, where the hidden rocks are?”

She nodded.

“Really, you are developing into a very gloomy person,” she said.  “Lawrence, don’t let us fence with one another any longer.  What you may decide to do politically may be ruinous to your career, to your chance of usefulness in the world, and to my hopes.  But I want you to understand this.  It can make no difference to me.  I have had dreams perhaps of a great future, of being the wife of a Prime Minister who would lead his country into a new era of prosperity, who would put the last rivets into the bonds of a great imperial empire.  But one never realizes all one’s hopes, Lawrence.  I love politics.  I love being behind the scenes, and helping to move the pawns across the board.  But I am a woman, too, Lawrence, and I love you.  Put everything connected with your public life on one side.  Let me ask you this.  You are changed.  Has anything come between us as man and woman?”

“Yes,” he answered, “something has come between us.”

She sat quite still for several minutes.  She prayed that he too might keep silence, and he seemed to know her thoughts.  Over the little sheet of ornamental water, down the glade of beech and elm trees narrowing towards the cliffs, her eyes travelled seawards.  It was to her a terrible moment.  Mannering had represented so much to her, and her standard was a high one.  If there was a man living whom she would have reckoned above the weaknesses of the herd, it was he.  In those days at Blakely she had almost idealized him.  The simple purity of his life there, his delicate and carefully chosen pleasures, combined with his almost passionate love of the open places of the earth, had led her to regard him as something different from any other man whom she had ever known.  All Borrowdean’s hints and open statements had gone for very little.  She had listened and retained her trust.  And now she had a horrible fear.  Something had gone out of the man, something which went for strength, something without which he seemed to lack that splendid militant vitality which had always seemed to her so admirable.  Perhaps he was going to make a confession, one of those crude, clumsy confessions of a stained life, which have drawn the colour and the joy from so many beautiful dreams.  She shivered a little, but she inclined her head to listen.

“Well,” she said, “what is it?”

“I have asked another woman to marry me only a few hours ago,” he said, quietly.

Berenice was a proud woman, and for the moment she felt her love for this man a dried-up and shrivelled thing.  She was white to the lips, but she commanded her voice, and her eyes met his coldly.

“May I inquire into the circumstances—­of this—­somewhat remarkable proceeding?” she inquired.