nd it
was a great pity that he had looked for her, because his wife, whose
sharp eyes nothing ever escaped, had seen him look.

CHAPTER XXX.

"IF I COULD DIE!"

Why cannot I forgo, forget
That ever I loved thee, that ever we met?
There is not a single link or sign
To bind thy life in this world with mine.

M. W. Praed.

But it was not until Captain and Mrs. Maurice Kynaston had been at home
for more than a fortnight that Vera came back to her brother-in-law's
house.

She had kept away, poor girl, as long as she could. She had put off the
evil hour of her return as long as possible. The Hazeldines had gone to
Scotland, and Vera had, in desperation, accepted an invitation to stay
with some acquaintances whom she neither knew very well nor liked
overmuch. It had kept her from Sutton a little longer. But the visit had
come to an end at last, and what was she to do? She had no other visits
to prolong her absence, and her sister wrote to her perpetually, urging
her to return. Her home was at Sutton; she had no other place to go to.
She had told Sir John that in absence from his brother lay her only hope
of safety. But where was she to seek that safety? Where find security,
when he; reckless, or, perchance, heedless of her danger, had come to
plant himself at her very doors? They should have been far as the poles
asunder, and a malevolent fate had willed that the same parish should
contain them.

For whatever Maurice did, Vera in no way underrated the danger. Too well
she knew her own heart; too surely she estimated the strength of a
passion which, repressed and thwarted, and half-smothered, as it had been
within her, yet burnt but the fiercer and the wilder. For that is the way
with love: if it may not flourish and thrive openly and bravely before
the eyes of the world, it will eat into the very heart and life, till all
that is fair and sweet in the garden of the soul is choked and blighted
and overgrown, till the main-spring of life becomes poisoned, and all
things that are happy, withered and dried up.

In Vera's love for Maurice there had been nothing of joy, and all of
pain. There had never been for her that sweet illusion of dawning
affection--that intangible sense of delight in the consciousness of an
unspoken sympathy that is the very essence of a happy love. She had no
memories that were serene and untroubled--no days of calm and delicious
happiness to recall. His first conscious look had