“Ruined?” she said.

“Yes.”

“You I’ll be more so than you were a month ago.  I mean, you tell me nothing new, I have known it.”

Amid the crush and hurry in his brain, caused by this strange communication, pressed the necessity to vindicate his honour.

“I give you the word of a gentleman, Lady Charlotte, that I came to you the first moment it has been made known to me.  I never suspected it before this day.”

“Nothing would prompt me to disbelieve that.”  She reached him her hand.

“You have known it!” he broke from a short silence.

“Yes—­never mind how.  I could not allude to it.  Of course I had to wait till you took the initiative.”

The impulse to think the best of what we are on the point of renouncing is spontaneous.  If at the same time this object shall exhibit itself in altogether new, undreamt-of, glorious colours, others besides a sentimentalist might waver, and be in some danger of clutching it a little tenderly ere it is cast off.

“My duty was to tell you the very instant it came to my knowledge,” he said, fascinated in his heart by the display of greatness of mind which he now half divined to be approaching, and wished to avoid.

“Well, I suppose that is a duty between friends?” said she.

“Between friends!  Shall we still—­always be friends?”

“I think I have said more than once that it won’t be my fault if we are not.”

“Because, the greater and happier ambition to which I aspired...”  This was what he designed to say, sentimentally propelled, by way of graceful exit, and what was almost printed on a scroll in his head for the tongue to read off fluently.  He stopped at ‘the greater,’ beginning to stumble—­to flounder; and fearing that he said less than was due as a compliment to the occasion, he said more.

By no means a quick reader of character, Lady Charlotte nevertheless perceived that the man who spoke in this fashion, after what she had confessed, must be sentimentally, if not actually, playing double.

Thus she came to his assistance:  “Are you begging permission to break our engagement?”

“At least, whatever I do get I must beg for now!” He took refuge adroitly in a foolish reply, and it served him.  That he had in all probability lost his chance by the method he had adopted, and by sentimentalizing at the wrong moment, was becoming evident, notwithstanding.  In a sort of despair he attempted comfort by critically examining her features, and trying to suit them to one or other of the numerous models of Love that a young man carries about with him.  Her eyes met his, and even as he was deciding against her on almost every point, the force of their frankness held his judgement in suspense.

“The world is rather harsh upon women in these cases,” she said, turning her head a lithe, with a conscious droop of the eyelids.  “I will act as if we had an equal burden between us.  On my side, what you have to tell me does not alter me.  I have known it....  You see that I am just the same to you.  For your part, you are free, if you please.  That is fair dealing, is it not?”