’It is all the good that I can do you.  Indeed I can do you—­can do no one any good.  The trees that the storms have splintered are never of use.’

‘And is this to be the end of it, Lily?’

‘Not of our loving friendship.’

’Friendship!  I hate the word.  I hear someone’s step, and I had better leave you.  Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye, John.  Be kinder than that to me as you are going.’  He turned back for a moment, took her hand, and held it tight against his heart, and then he left her.  In the hall he met Mrs Thorne, but, as she said afterwards, he had been too much knocked about to be able to throw a word to a dog.

To Mrs Thorne Lily said hardly a word about John Eames, and when her cousin Bernard questioned her about him she was dumb.  And in these days she could assume a manner, and express herself with her eyes as well as with her voice, after a fashion, which was apt to silence unwelcome questions, even though they were intimate with her as was her cousin Bernard.  She had described her feelings more plainly to her lover than she had ever done to anyone—­even to her mother; and having done so she meant to be silent on that subject for evermore.  But of her settled purpose, she did say some word to Emily Dunstable that night.  ’I do feel,’ she said, ‘that I have got the thing settled at last.’

’And have you settled it, as you call it, in opposition to the wishes of all your friends?’

’That is true; and yet I have settled it rightly, and I would not for worlds have it unsettled again.  There are matters on which friends should not have wishes, or at any rate should not express them.’

‘Is that meant to be severe to me?’

’No; not to you.  I was thinking about mamma, and Bell, and my uncle, and Bernard, who all seem to think that I am to be looked upon as a regular castaway because I am not likely to have a husband of my own.  Of course you, in your position, must think a girl a castaway who isn’t going to be married?’

‘I think that a girl who is going to be married has the best of it.’

’And I think a girl who isn’t going to be married has the best of it;—­that’s all.  But I feel that the thing is done now, and I am contented.  For the last six or eight months there has come up, I know not how, a state of doubt which as made me so wretched that I have done literally nothing.  I haven’t been able to finish old Mrs Heard’s tippet, literally because people would talk to me about that dearest of all dear fellows, John Eames.  And yet all along I have known how it would be—­as well as I do now.’

‘I cannot understand you, Lily; I can’t indeed.’

’I can understand myself.  I love him so well—­with that intimate, close, familiar affection—­that I could wash his clothes for him tomorrow, out of pure personal regard, and think it no shame.  He could not ask me to do a single thing for him—­except one thing—­that I would refuse.  And I’ll go further.  I would sooner marry him than any other man I ever saw, or, as I believe, that I ever shall see.  And yet I am glad that it is settled.’