She started violently, and a faint cry of surprise escaped her.  Every word she had spoken had innocently betrayed her purity and truth to a man who thoroughly understood the priceless value of a pure and true woman.  Her own noble conduct had been the hidden enemy, throughout, of all the hopes she had trusted to it.  I had dreaded this from the first.  I would have prevented it, if she had allowed me the smallest chance of doing so.  I even waited and watched now, when the harm was done, for a word from Sir Percival that would give me the opportunity of putting him in the wrong.

“You have left it to me, Miss Fairlie, to resign you,” he continued.  “I am not heartless enough to resign a woman who has just shown herself to be the noblest of her sex.”

He spoke with such warmth and feeling, with such passionate enthusiasm, and yet with such perfect delicacy, that she raised her head, flushed up a little, and looked at him with sudden animation and spirit.

“No!” she said firmly.  “The most wretched of her sex, if she must give herself in marriage when she cannot give her love.”

“May she not give it in the future,” he asked, “if the one object of her husband’s life is to deserve it?”

“Never!” she answered.  “If you still persist in maintaining our engagement, I may be your true and faithful wife, Sir Percival—­ your loving wife, if I know my own heart, never!”

She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steeled his heart against her.  I tried hard to feel that Sir Percival was to blame, and to say so, but my womanhood would pity him, in spite of myself.

“I gratefully accept your faith and truth,” he said.  “The least that you can offer is more to me than the utmost that I could hope for from any other woman in the world.”

Her left hand still held mine, but her right hand hung listlessly at her side.  He raised it gently to his lips—­touched it with them, rather than kissed it—­bowed to me—­and then, with perfect delicacy and discretion, silently quitted the room.

She neither moved nor said a word when he was gone—­she sat by me, cold and still, with her eyes fixed on the ground.  I saw it was hopeless and useless to speak, and I only put my arm round her, and held her to me in silence.  We remained together so for what seemed a long and weary time—­so long and so weary, that I grew uneasy and spoke to her softly, in the hope of producing a change.

The sound of my voice seemed to startle her into consciousness.  She suddenly drew herself away from me and rose to her feet.

“I must submit, Marian, as well as I can,” she said.  “My new life has its hard duties, and one of them begins to-day.”

As she spoke she went to a side-table near the window, on which her sketching materials were placed, gathered them together carefully, and put them in a drawer of her cabinet.  She locked the drawer and brought the key to me.