‘He has told me all,’ said Graye soothingly.  ’He is going off early to-morrow morning.  ’Twas a shame of him to win you away from me, and cruel of you to keep the growth of this attachment a secret.’

‘We couldn’t help it,’ she said, and then jumping up—­’Owen, has he told you all?’

‘All of your love from beginning to end,’ he said simply.

Edward then had not told more—­as he ought to have done:  yet she could not convict him.  But she would struggle against his fetters.  She tingled to the very soles of her feet at the very possibility that he might be deluding her.

‘Owen,’ she continued, with dignity, ’what is he to me?  Nothing.  I must dismiss such weakness as this—­believe me, I will.  Something far more pressing must drive it away.  I have been looking my position steadily in the face, and I must get a living somehow.  I mean to advertise once more.’

‘Advertising is no use.’

‘This one will be.’  He looked surprised at the sanguine tone of her answer, till she took a piece of paper from the table and showed it him.  ‘See what I am going to do,’ she said sadly, almost bitterly.  This was her third effort:—­

  ’Lady’s-maid.  Inexperienced.  Age eighteen.—­G., 3 Cross Street,
  Budmouth.’

Owen—­Owen the respectable—­looked blank astonishment.  He repeated in a nameless, varying tone, the two words—­

‘Lady’s-maid!’

’Yes; lady’s-maid.  ‘Tis an honest profession,’ said Cytherea bravely.

‘But you, Cytherea?’

‘Yes, I—­who am I?’

‘You will never be a lady’s-maid—­never, I am quite sure.’

‘I shall try to be, at any rate.’

‘Such a disgrace—­’

‘Nonsense!  I maintain that it is no disgrace!’ she said, rather warmly.  ‘You know very well—­’

‘Well, since you will, you must,’ he interrupted.  ’Why do you put “inexperienced?"’

‘Because I am.’

’Never mind that—­scratch out “inexperienced.”  We are poor, Cytherea, aren’t we?’ he murmured, after a silence, ’and it seems that the two months will close my engagement here.’

‘We can put up with being poor,’ she said, ’if they only give us work to do. . . .  Yes, we desire as a blessing what was given us as a curse, and even that is denied.  However, be cheerful, Owen, and never mind!’

In justice to desponding men, it is as well to remember that the brighter endurance of women at these epochs—­invaluable, sweet, angelic, as it is—­owes more of its origin to a narrower vision that shuts out many of the leaden-eyed despairs in the van, than to a hopefulness intense enough to quell them.

IV.  THE EVENTS OF ONE DAY

1.  August the fourth.  Till four o’clock

The early part of the next week brought an answer to Cytherea’s last note of hope in the way of advertisement—­not from a distance of hundreds of miles, London, Scotland, Ireland, the Continent—­as Cytherea seemed to think it must, to be in keeping with the means adopted for obtaining it, but from a place in the neighbourhood of that in which she was living—­a country mansion not twenty miles off.  The reply ran thus:—­