The promise was extracted.  The Countess went to fetch Caroline.  Evan did not count the minutes.  One thought was mounting in his brain-the scorn of Rose.  He felt that he had lost her.  Lost her when he had just won her!  He felt it, without realizing it.  The first blows of an immense grief are dull, and strike the heart through wool, as it were.  The belief of the young in their sorrow has to be flogged into them, on the good old educational principle.  Could he do less than this he was about to do?  Rose had wedded her noble nature to him, and it was as much her spirit as his own that urged him thus to forfeit her, to be worthy of her by assuming unworthiness.

There he sat neither conning over his determination nor the cause for it, revolving Rose’s words about Laxley, and nothing else.  The words were so sweet and so bitter; every now and then the heavy smiting on his heart set it quivering and leaping, as the whip starts a jaded horse.

Meantime the Countess was participating in a witty conversation in the drawing-room with Sir John and the Duke, Miss Current, and others; and it was not till after she had displayed many graces, and, as one or two ladies presumed to consider, marked effrontery, that she rose and drew Caroline away with her.  Returning to her dressing-room, she found that Evan had faithfully kept his engagement; he was on the exact spot where she had left him.

Caroline came to him swiftly, and put her hand to his forehead that she might the better peruse his features, saying, in her mellow caressing voice:  ’What is this, dear Van, that you will do?  Why do you look so wretched?’

‘Has not Louisa told you?’

’She has told me something, dear, but I don’t know what it is.  That you are going to expose us?  What further exposure do we need?  I’m sure, Van, my pride—­what I had—­is gone.  I have none left!’

Evan kissed her brows warmly.  An explanation, full of the Countess’s passionate outcries of justification, necessity, and innocence in higher than fleshly eyes, was given, and then the three were silent.

‘But, Van,’ Caroline commenced, deprecatingly, ’my darling! of what use —­now!  Whether right or wrong, why should you, why should you, when the thing is done, dear?—­think!’

‘And you, too, would let another suffer under an unjust accusation?’ said Evan.

’But, dearest, it is surely your duty to think of your family first.  Have we not been afflicted enough?  Why should you lay us under this fresh burden?’

’Because it ‘s better to bear all now than a life of remorse,’ answered Evan.

’But this Mr. Laxley—­I cannot pity him; he has behaved so insolently to you throughout!  Let him suffer.’

‘Lady Jocelyn,’ said Evan, ’has been unintentionally unjust to him, and after her kindness—­apart from the right or wrong—­I will not—­I can’t allow her to continue so.’