would not speak out, and such an excuse between us is monstrous! Ours
is not a formal 'mariage de convenance;' it lies with ourselves. She is
obviously not seriously ill; if she hesitates on her own account she
must know she has nothing to fear from me; if she hesitates on mine,
then it is folly and nonsense. I don't care about anything! I don't
care what is the matter with her, I would marry her if she were dying,
rotting of leprosy to-morrow!"

"I say, old fellow, you must not excite yourself like this! You will be
seriously ill if you don't look out," Dick answered, remonstratingly.
"It's no use working yourself up into a fever."

"I am not working myself up; unfortunately that has been done for me,"
I answered, with a short laugh. "Well, Dick, I am sick of everything,
disgusted with everything! It's the same old story perpetually
repeated. All that one fixes one's eyes on in the distance turns into
dust as one approaches it. For the last year I have thought of this
meeting this evening, and now it has come, what is it?"

"You are taking me by surprise to-night, Victor! I remember you in the
regiment as so deuced calm."

"I'm never calm!" I returned. "Exteriorly, yes, of course, for one's
own convenience and self-respect, to outsiders, one is always calm; but
the exterior is not the reality. I am not one of those things naturally
which I command myself into being: existence to me is nothing but a
close-fitting, strangling, self-restraint. It drags upon me like a
prisoner's gangrening fetter, and I'm getting tired of it. I think I'll
slip it off altogether!"

I talked straight out of the distraction of my own thoughts, the pain
in my head was acute, stunning my brain, and my vision seemed all
wrong, as when one has been drinking. I was conscious of Dick looking
at me anxiously, as he said--

"That's all nonsense! You are quite out of your senses this evening!
You wouldn't throw up your life now, when you are just on the point of
success, surely?"

"If I can't force our marriage, it's likely to come to that, I think,"
I muttered. "I am totally at a loss. I know nothing. I can conjecture
nothing. I have not seen her nor heard from her this past year; and now
she will say nothing. I pressed her as much, I think, as a fellow
decently could. If she had spoken clearly and definitely it would have
been different. Whatever statement a woman made to me of any painful
facts; or if she came to me with any confession of