‘Never.  You think me wretchedly weak, but you shall see—­’

‘It’s of your own free will you undertake it?’

‘Yes, of my own free will,’ she answered firmly.  ’I won’t come to you penniless.  It isn’t right I should do so.  My father didn’t mean that.  If I had had the sense and the courage to tell him, all this misery would have been spared.  That money is mine by every right, and I won’t lose it.  Not only for your sake and my own—­there is some one else to think of.’

Tarrant gave her a kind look.

‘Don’t count upon it.  Trust to me.’

’I like to hear you say that, but I don’t wish you to be put to proof.  You are not the kind of man to make money.’

‘How do you mean it?’

’As you like to take it.  Silly boy, don’t I love you just because you are not one of the money-making men?  If you hadn’t a penny in the world, I should love you just the same; and I couldn’t love you more if you had millions.’

The change which Tarrant expected did not come.  To the end, she was brave and bright, her own best self.  She said good-bye without a tear, refused to let him accompany her, and so, even as she had resolved, left in her husband’s mind an image beckoning his return.

Part IV:  The Veiled Figure

CHAPTER 1

Before his admission to a partnership in Mr. Lord’s business, Samuel Barmby lived with his father and two sisters in Coldharbour Lane.  Their house was small, old and crumbling for lack of repair; the landlord, his ground-lease having but a year or two to run, looked on with equanimity whilst the building decayed.  Under any circumstances, the family must soon have sought a home elsewhere, and Samuel’s good fortune enabled them to take a house in Dagmar Road, not far from Grove Lane; a new and most respectable house, with bay windows rising from the half-sunk basement to the second storey.  Samuel, notwithstanding his breadth of mind, privately admitted the charm of such an address as ‘Dagmar Road,’ which looks well at the head of note-paper, and falls with sonority from the lips.

The Barmby sisters, Lucy and Amelia by name, were unpretentious young women, without personal attractions, and soberly educated.  They professed a form of Dissent; their reading was in certain religious and semi-religious periodicals, rarely in books; domestic occupations took up most of their time, and they seldom had any engagements.  At appointed seasons, a festivity in connection with ‘the Chapel’ called them forth; it kept them in a flutter for many days, and gave them a headache.  In the strictest sense their life was provincial; nominally denizens of London, they dwelt as remote from everything metropolitan as though Camberwell were a village of the Midlands.  If they suffered from discontent, no one heard of it; a confession by one or the other that she ‘felt dull’ excited the sister’s surprise, and invariably led to the suggestion of ’a little medicine.’