“Vous pleurez et vous etes roi?” He hardly knew that he had muttered the words as he so often muttered a quotation to himself.  But Rose did not hear them.  She was too preoccupied with her own thoughts and feelings to notice him closely.  Ah! if she had but known before what it would be to lose him!  She was horrified as she felt her self-control failing her, and an enormous agony entering into possession of all her faculties.  She was so startled, so amazed at this revelation of herself.  If she had felt less, she would have thought more for him.  She did not think for a moment what that silent standing by her side meant for him.  She knew at last the selfishness of passion.  She wanted him as she had never wanted anyone or anything before.  She could only think of the craving of her own heart, the extraordinary trouble that possessed it.  Those who have had a passing acquaintance with love, those who have sown brief passages of love thoughts over their early youth, can form no notion of what that first surrender meant to Rose.  “Too late!” cried the tyrant love, the only tyrant that can carry conviction by its mere fiat to the innermost recesses of a nature.  “Too late!—­it might have been, but not now; it is all your own doing; you made him suffer once; you are the only one to suffer now.  You are crying now the easy tears of a child, but there are years and years before you when the tears will not come, call for them as you may; they cannot go on coming from a broken heart.  They flow away out of the fissures, and then the dryness and barrenness of daily misery will not let them come again.”

“He never cared as I do,” thought Rose; “he does not know what it is!”

She called her persecutor “it”; she shrank from its name even now with an unutterable embarrassment.  When she did turn to Edmund it was more as if to confide to him what she was suffering from someone else; it was so habitual to her to turn to him.  What was the use? what was the use?  How could she use him against himself?  No, no; she must, she must control herself.  She must not tell him; she must let him go quite quietly now; she must make no appeal to the past; he was too generous—­she did not want his generosity.  She put her hands to her forehead and pushed the hair backwards.

“I’m not well, I think,” she said; “the room at the meeting was stuffy.  I—­I didn’t quite understand what you said—­I’m glad.”

She sank on to a chair, and then got up again.

“I’m glad you’ve got what you wanted, but I’m startled—­no, I mean I’m not quite well.  I don’t think I can talk to-day—­I don’t understand—­I——­”

She stood almost with her back to him then.

He was so amazed at her words that he could not speak at all.  This was not sweetness, kindness, pity; this was something else, something different; it was almost a shock!

“I am so silly,” she said, with a most absurd attempt at a natural voice, “I think I must——­” Her figure swayed a little.