‘Yes,’ Wilfrid replied; ‘she looked far too ill to be up.’

He had seated himself on the sofa.  His hands would not hold the tea-cup steadily; he put it down by his side.

’I fear there is small chance of her getting much better in that house of illness,’ said Mrs. Baxendale, observing his agitation.  ’Can’t we persuade her to go somewhere?  Her mother is in excellent hands.’

‘I wish we could,’ Wilfrid replied, clearly without much attention to his words.

‘You didn’t propose anything of the kind?’

He made no answer.  A short silence intervened, and he felt there was no choice but to declare the truth.

‘The meeting was a very painful one,’ he began.  ’It is difficult to speak to you about it.  Do you think that she has perfectly recovered?—­that her mind is wholly—­’

He hesitated; it was dreadful to be speaking in this way of Emily.  The sound of his voice reproached him; what words would not appear brutal in such a case?

‘You fear—?’

Wilfrid rose and walked across the room.  It seemed impossible to speak, yet equally so to keep his misery to himself.

‘Mrs. Baxendale,’ he said at length, ’I am perhaps doing a very wrong thing in telling you what passed between us, but I feel quite unable to decide upon any course without the aid of your judgment.  I am in a terrible position.  Either I must believe Emily to speak without responsibility, or something inexplicable, incredible, has come to pass.  She has asked me to release her.  She says that something has happened which makes it impossible for her ever to fulfil her promise, something which must always remain her secret, which I may not hope to understand.  And with such dreadful appearance of sincerity—­such a face of awful suffering—­’

His voice failed.  The grave concern on Mrs. Baxendale’s visage was not encouraging.

‘Something happened?’ the latter repeated, in low-toned astonishment.  ‘Does she offer no kind of explanation?’

‘None—­none,’ he added, ‘that I can bring myself to believe.’

Mrs. Baxendale could only look at him questioningly.

‘She said,’ Wilfrid continued, pale with the effort it cost him to speak, ‘that she has no longer any affection for me.’

There was another silence, of longer endurance than the last.  Wilfrid was the first to break it.

’My reason for refusing to believe it is, that she said it when she had done her utmost to convince me of her earnestness in other ways, and said it in a way—­How is it possible for me to believe it?  It is only two months since I saw her on the Castle Hill.’

‘I thought you had never been here before?’

’I have never spoken to you of that.  I came and left on the same day, It was to see her before I went to Switzerland.’

‘I am at a loss,’ said Mrs. Baxendale.  ’I can only suggest that she has had a terrible shock, and that her recovery, or seeming recovery, has been too rapid.  Yet there is no trace of wandering in her talk with me.’