‘Did you see the action such at the time?’

’No, surely; else I would not have been guilty of that for which I am truly sorry now.’

’Then, perhaps, the day will come when, looking back on what you do now, you will regard it with the like disapprobation.—­God grant it may!’ she added, with a deep sigh.

’That can hardly be, mistress Dorothy.  I am, in the matters to which you refer, under the influence of no passion, no jealousy, no self-seeking, no—­’

’Perhaps a deeper search might discover in you each and all of the bosom-sins you so stoutly abjure,’ interrupted Dorothy.  ’But it is needless for you to defend yourself to me; I am not your judge.’

‘So much the better for me!’ returned Richard; ’I should else have an unjust as well as severe one.  I, on my part, hope the day may come when you will find something to repent of in such harshness towards an old friend whom you choose to think in the wrong.’

’Richard Heywood, God is my witness it is no choice of mine.  I have no choice:  what else is there to think?  I know well enough what you and your father are about.  But there is nothing save my own conscience and my mother’s love I would not part with to be able to believe you honourably right in your own eyes—­not in mine—­God forbid!  That can never be—­not until fair is foul and foul is fair.’

So saying, she held out her hand.

‘God be between thee and me, Dorothy!’ said Richard, with solemnity, as he took it in his.

He spoke with a voice that seemed to him far away and not his own.  Until now he had never realized the idea of a final separation between him and Dorothy; and even now, he could hardly believe she was in earnest, but felt, rather, like a child whose nurse threatens to forsake him on the dark road, and who begins to weep only from the pitiful imagination of the thing, and not any actual fear of her carrying the threat into execution.  The idea of retaining her love by ceasing to act on his convictions—­the very possibility of it—­had never crossed the horizon of his thoughts.  Had it come to him as the merest intellectual notion, he would have perceived at once, of such a loyal stock did he come, and so loyal had he himself been to truth all his days, that to act upon her convictions instead of his own would have been to widen a gulf at least measurable, to one infinite and impassable.

She withdrew the hand which had solemnly pressed his, and left the room.  For a moment he stood gazing after her.  Even in that moment, the vague fear that she would not come again grew to a plain conviction, and forcibly repressing the misery that rose in bodily presence from his heart to his throat, he left the house, hurried down the pleached alley to the old sun-dial, threw himself on the grass under the yews, and wept and longed for war.