or such as her sound intelligence deemed adequate, was it possible to violate the confidence implied in such a conversation between her and himself?  Till his mind had assumed some degree of calmness, he could not trust himself to return to the house.  Turning from the main road at a point just before the bridge over the river, he kept on the outskirts of the town, and continued walking till he had almost made the circuit of Dunfield.  His speed was that of a man who hastened with some express object; his limbs seemed spurred to activity by the gallop of his thoughts.  His reason would scarcely accept the evidence of consciousness that he had indeed just heard such things from Emily’s lips; it was too monstrous for belief; a resolute incredulity sustained him beneath a blow which, could he have felt it to be meant in very earnest, would have deprived him of his senses.  She did no!, she could not, know what she had said!  Yet she spoke with such cruel appearance of reasoning earnestness; was it possible for a diseased mind to assume so convincingly the modes of rational utterance?  What conceivable circumstances could bring her to such a resolution?  Her words, ‘I do not love you,’ made horrible repetition in his ears; it was as though he had heard her speak them again and again. Could they be true?  The question, last outcome of the exercise of his imagination on the track of that unimaginable cause, brought him to a standstill, physically and mentally.  Those words had at first scarcely engaged his thought; it was her request to be released that seriously concerned him; that falsehood had been added as a desperate means of gaining her end.  Yet now, all other explanations in vain exhausted, perforce he gave heed to that hideous chime of memory.  It was not her father’s death that caused her illness that she admitted, Had some horrible complication intervened, some incredible change come upon her, since he left England?  He shook off this suggestion as blasphemy.  Emily?  His high-souled Emily, upon whose faith he would stake the breath of his life?  Was his own reason failing him?

Worn out, he reached the house in the middle of the afternoon, and went to his own sitting-room.  Presently a servant came and asked whether he would take luncheon.  He declined.  Lying on the sofa, he still tormented himself with doubt whether he might speak with Mrs. Baxendale.  That lady put an end to his hesitation by herself coming to his room.  He sprang up.

‘Don’t move, don’t move!’ she exclaimed in her cheery way.  ’I have only come to ask why you resolve to starve yourself.  You can’t have had lunch anywhere?’

‘No; I am not hungry.’

‘A headache?’ she asked, looking at him with kind shrewdness.

‘A little, perhaps.’

‘Then at all events you will have tea.  May I ask them to bring it here?’

She went away, and, a few minutes after her return, tea was brought.

‘You found Emily looking sadly, I’m afraid?’ she said, with one of the provincialisms which occasionally marked her language.