There they stood in silence, gasping at the barrier that divided them.

Suddenly a noise was heard.  ‘Stop! stop!’ cried the voice of John Raikes.  ’When a lady and gentleman are talking together, sir, do you lean your long ears over them—­ha?’

Looking round, Evan beheld Laxley a step behind, and Jack rushing up to him, seizing his collar, and instantly undergoing ignominious prostration for his heroic defence of the privacy of lovers.

‘Stand aside’; said Laxley, imperiously.  ’Rosey so you’ve come for me.  Take my arm.  You are under my protection.’

Another forlorn ‘Is it true?’ Rose cast toward Evan with her eyes.  He wavered under them.

‘Did you receive my letter?’ he demanded of Laxley.

‘I decline to hold converse with you,’ said Laxley, drawing Rose’s hand on his arm.

‘You will meet me to-day or to-morrow?’

‘I am in the habit of selecting my own company.’

Rose disengaged her hand.  Evan grasped it.  No word of farewell was uttered.  Her mouth moved, but her eyes were hard shut, and nothing save her hand’s strenuous pressure, equalling his own, told that their parting had been spoken, the link violently snapped.

Mr. John Raikes had been picked up and pulled away by Polly.  She now rushed to Evan:  ’Good-bye, and God bless you, dear Mr. Harrington.  I’ll find means of letting you know how she is.  And he shan’t have her, mind!’

Rose was walking by Laxley’s side, but not leaning on his arm.  Evan blessed her for this.  Ere she was out of sight the fly rolled down the street.  She did not heed it, did not once turn her head.  Ah, bitter unkindness!

When Love is hurt, it is self-love that requires the opiate.  Conning gave it him in the form of a note in a handwriting not known to him.  It said: 

     ’I do not believe it, and nothing will ever make me. 
                    ‘Juliana.’

Evan could not forget these words.  They coloured his farewell to Beckley:  the dear old downs, the hopgardens, the long grey farms walled with clipped yew, the home of his lost love!  He thought of them through weary nights when the ghostly image with the hard shut eyelids and the quivering lips would rise and sway irresolutely in air till a shape out of the darkness extinguished it.  Pride is the God of Pagans.  Juliana had honoured his God.  The spirit of Juliana seemed to pass into the body of Rose, and suffer for him as that ghostly image visibly suffered.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

IN WHICH WE HAVE TO SEE IN THE DARK

So ends the fourth act of our comedy.

After all her heroism and extraordinary efforts, after, as she feared, offending Providence—­after facing Tailordom—­the Countess was rolled away in a dingy fly unrewarded even by a penny, for what she had gone through.  For she possessed eminently the practical nature of her sex; and though she would have scorned, and would have declined to handle coin so base, its absence was upbraidingly mentioned in her spiritual outcries.  Not a penny!