Still gazing at the dragon-fly, as if careless of what she did, she held her hand to him.  Piers folded it in both his own.

“May I hold it as long as I live?”

“Is that a new thought of yours?” she asked, in a voice that shook as it tried to suggest laughter in her mind.

“The newest!  The most daring and the most glorious I ever had.”

“Why, then I have been mistaken,” she said softly, for an instant meeting his eyes.  “I fancied I owed you something for a wrong I did, without meaning it, more than eight years gone by.”

“That thought had come to you?” Piers exclaimed, with eyes gleaming.

“Indeed it had.  I shall be more than half sorry if I have to lose it.”

“How foolish I was!  What wild, monstrous folly!  How could you have dreamt for a moment that such a one as I was could dare to love you?  —­Irene, you did me no wrong.  You gave me the ideal of my life—­ something I should never lose from my heart and mind—­something to live towards!  Not a hope; hope would have been madness.  I have loved you without hope; loved you because I had found the only one I could love—­the one I must love—­on and on to the end.”

She laid her free hand upon his that clasped the other, and bowed him to her reasoning mood.

“Let me speak of other things—­that have to be made plain between you and me.  First of all, a piece of news.  I have just heard that my brother is going to marry Mrs. John Jacks.”

Piers was mute with astonishment.  It was so long since he had seen Mrs. Jacks, and he pictured her as a woman much older than Eustace Derwent.  His clearest recollection of her was that remark she made at the luncheon-table about the Irish, that they were so “sentimental”; it had blurred her beauty and her youth in his remembrance.

“Yes, Eustace is going to marry her; and I shouldn’t wonder if the marriage turns out well.  It leads to the disagreeable thing I have to talk about.  You know that.  I engaged myself to Arnold Jacks.  I did so freely, thinking I did right.  When the time of the marriage drew near, I had learnt that I had done wrong.  Not that I wished to be the wife of anyone else.  I loved nobody; I did not love the man I was pretending to.  As soon as I knew that—­what was I to do?  To marry him was a crime—­no less a crime for its being committed every day.  I took my courage in both hands.  I told him I did not love him, I would not marry him.  And—­I ran away.”

The memory made her bosom heave, her cheeks flush.

“Magnificent!” commented the listener, with a happy smile.

“An! but I didn’t do it very well.  I treated him badly—­yes, inconsiderately, selfishly.  The thing had to be done—­but there were ways of doing it.  Unfortunately I had got to resent my captivity, and I spoke to him as if he were to blame.  From the point of view of delicacy, perhaps he was; he should have released me at once, and that he wouldn’t.  But I was too little regardful of what it meant to him—­above all to his pride.  I have so often reproached myself.  I do it now for the last time.  There!” She picked up a pebble to fling away.  “It is gone I We speak of the thing no more.”