“It is not that; you do not understand.  I daresay I could be happy enough; that is not why I cannot marry you.”

“Why not, then?”

“I dare not,” she said, in a low voice.

He drew in his breath.  “Ah!” he said, between his teeth, “is it so bad with you as that?”

She bent her head in silent assent.

“That is hard,” he said, almost to himself, looking gloomily before him.  Presently he spoke again.  “Thank you, Vera,” he said, rather brokenly.  “You are a brave woman and a true one.  Many would have taken my all, and given me back only deception and falseness.  But you are incapable of that, and—­and you fear your own strength; is that it?”

“Whilst he lives,” she said, with a sudden burst of passion, “I can know no safety.  Never to see his face again can be my only safeguard, and with you I could never be safe.  Why, even to bear your name would be to scorch my heart every time I was addressed by it.  Forgive me, John,” turning to him with a sudden penitence, “I should not have pained you by saying these things; you who have been so infinitely good to me.  Go your way across the world, and forget me.  Ah! have I not been a curse to every one who bears the name of Kynaston?”

He was silent from very pity.  Vera was no longer to him the goddess of his imagination; the one pure and peerless woman, above all other women, such as he had once fancied her to be.  But surely she was dearer to him now, in all her weakness and her suffering, than she had ever been on that lofty pedestal of perfection upon which he had once lifted her.

He pitied her so much, and yet he could not help her; her malady was past remedy.  And, as she had told him, it was no one’s fault—­it was only a miserable mistake.  He had never had her heart—­he saw it plainly now.  Many little things in the past, which he had scarcely remembered at the time, came back to his memory—­little details of that week at Shadonake, when Maurice had lived in the same house with her, whilst he had only gone over daily to see her.  Always, in those days, Maurice had been by her side, and Vera had been dreamily happy, with that fixed look of content with which the presence of the man she loves best beautifies and poetises a woman’s face.  Sir John was not a very observant man; but now, after it was all over, these things came back to him.  The night of the ball, Mrs. Romer’s mysterious hints, and his own vague disquietude at her words; later on Maurice’s reasonless refusal to be present at his wedding, and Vera’s startled face of dismay when he had asked her to go and plead with him to stay for it.

They had struggled against their hearts, it was clear, these poor lovers, whose lives were both tied up and bound before ever they had met each other.  But nature had been too strong for them; and the woman, at least, had torn herself free from the chains that had become insupportable to her.