‘I thought it very solemn.’

’What I mean is that I find an excuse in remembering that I was doing what she asked me to do.’

‘What she asked you to do, Fred?’

‘What I had promised, I mean.’

‘What you had promised?  I did not hear that before.’  These last words were spoken in a very low voice, but they went direct to Captain Aylmer’s ears.

‘But you have heard me declare,’ he said, ’that as regards myself nothing could be more satisfactory.’

‘Fred,’ she said, ’listen to me for a moment.  You and I engaged ourselves to each other yesterday as man and wife.’

‘Of course we did.’

’Listen to me, dear Fred. In doing that there was nothing in my mind unbefitting the sadness of the day.  Even in death we must think of life, and if it were well for you and me that we should be together it would surely have been but a foolish ceremony between us to have abstained from telling each other that it would be so because my aunt had died last week.  But it may be, and I think it is the case, that the feelings arising from her death have made us both too precipitate.’

‘I don’t understand how that can be.’

’You have been anxious to keep a promise made to her, without considering sufficiently whether in doing so you would secure your own happiness; and I’

’I don’t know about you, but as regards myself I must be considered to be the best judge.’

’And I have been too much in a hurry in believing that which I wished to believe.’

‘What do you mean by all this, Clara?’

’I mean that our engagement shall be at an end; not necessarily so for always.  But that as an engagement binding us both, it shall for the present cease to exist.  You shall be again free’

‘But I don’t choose to be free.’

’When you think of it you will find it best that it should be so.  You have performed your promise honestly, even though at a sacrifice to yourself.  Luckily for you for both of us, I should say the full truth has come out; and we can consider quietly what will be best for us to do, independently of that promise.  We will part, therefore, as dear friends but not as engaged to each other as man and wife.’

‘But we are engaged, and I will not hear of its being broken.’

’A lady’s word, Fred, is always the most potential before marriage; and you must therefore yield to me in this matter.  I am sure your judgment will approve of my decision when you think of it.  There shall be no engagement between us.  I shall consider myself quite free free to do as I please altogether; and you, of course, will be free also.’

‘If you please, of course it must be so.’

‘I do please, Fred.’

‘And yesterday, then, is to go for nothing.’

’Not exactly.  It cannot go for nothing with me.  I told you too many of my secrets for that.  But nothing that was done or said yesterday is to be held as binding upon either of us.’