‘You place Thyrza above Annabel Newthorpe?’

It was asked almost indignantly, so that Mrs. Ormonde smiled and raised her hand.

‘You, it is clear, resent it.’

He reddened.  Mrs. Ormonde continued: 

’I compare them merely.  I don’t think Thyrza will find the husband who is worthy of her, but I think it likely that she will win more love than you could ever give her.  I have told you that she is dear to me.  To you I would give a daughter of my own with entire confidence, for you are human and of noble impulses.  But I do not wish you to marry Thyrza.  Yes, you read my thought.  It is not solely the question of love.  I wish you—­I have so long wished you—­to marry Annabel.  To Thyrza you do not the least injustice by withholding your offer; she is happy without you.  You are entirely free to consult your own highest interests.  If I counsel wrongly, the blame is mine.  But, Walter, you must after all decide for yourself.  It is a most hazardous part this that I am playing; at least, it would be, if I did not see the facts of the case so clearly.  Rest till to-morrow; then let us sneak again.  Shall it be so?’

Egremont left The Chestnuts and walked along the shore in moonlight.  His mind had received a shock, and the sense of disturbance affected him physically.  He was obliged to move rapidly, to breathe the air.

He had left America with fixity of purpose.  His plain duty was to go to Thyrza and ask her to marry him.  Be her position what it might, his own was clear enough.  He looked forward with a certain pleasure to the mere discharge of so plain an obligation.

Mrs. Ormonde had studiously refrained from expressing any thought with regard to the future in her letters.  He quite expected that she would repeat to him with a certain emphasis the fact of Thyrza’s present cheerfulness; but he did not anticipate serious opposition to the course he had decided upon.  Practically Thyrza had lived in preparation for a life of refinement; Mrs. Ormonde, he concluded, knew that he could act but in one way, and, though refusing to do so ostensibly, had in fact been removing the rougher difficulties.  Her attitude now surprised him, made him uneasy.

Yet he knew his own inability to resist her.  He knew that she spoke on the side of his secret hope.  He knew that a debate which had long gone on within himself, to himself unavowed, had at length to find its plain-spoken issue.

His passion for Thyrza was dead; he even wondered how it could ever have been so violent.  It seemed to him that he scarcely knew her; could he not count on his fingers the number of times that he had seen her?  So much had intervened between him and her, between himself as he was then and his present self.  It was with apprehension that he thought of marrying her.  He knew what miseries had again and again resulted from marriages such as this, and he feared for her quite as much as for himself.  For there was no more passion.