And if you give a lie a start, it's
terribly hard to catch. Sabina Dinnett came to see me on Sunday
afternoon and I trust with all my heart she told me what wasn't true."

He felt a sudden gleam of hope and she saw it.

"Don't let any cheerful feeling betray you; this is far from a cheerful
subject for any of us. But again, I say, I hope that Sabina Dinnett has
come to wrong conclusions. What she said was this. Trust me to be
accurate, and when I have done, correct her statement if it is false.
Frankly, I thought her a highly intelligent young woman, with grace of
mind and fine feeling. She was fighting for her future and she did it
like a gentlewoman."

Miss Ironsyde then related her conversation with Sabina and Raymond knew
it to be faithful in every particular.

"Is that true, or isn't it?" she concluded.

"Yes, it's perfectly true, save in her assumption that I had changed my
mind," he said. "What I may have done since, doesn't matter; but when I
left her, I had not changed my mind in the least; if she had waited for
me to act in my own time, and come to see you, and so on, as I meant to
do, and broken it to Daniel myself, instead of hearing him break it to
me and dismiss me as though I were a drunken groom, then I should have
kept my word to her. But these things, and her action, and the fact that
she and her fool of a mother have bleated the story all over the
county--these things have decided me it would be a terrible mistake to
marry Sabina now. She's not what I thought. Her true character is not
trustworthy--in fact--well, you must see for yourself that they don't
trust me and are holding a pistol to my head. And no man is going to
stand that. We could never be married now, because she hates me. There's
another reason too--a practical one."

"What?"

"Why, the best. I'm a pauper. Daniel has chucked me out of the works."

Miss Ironsyde showed very great distress.

"Do you honestly mean that you could look the world in the face if you
ruin this woman?"

"Why use words like that? She's not ruined, any more than thousands of
other women."

"I'm ashamed of you, Raymond. I hope to God you've never said a thing so
base as that to anybody but me. And if I thought you meant it, I think
it would break my heart. But you don't mean it. You loved the girl and
you are an honourable man without a shadow on your good name so far.
You loved Sabina, and you do love her, and if you said you didn't a
thousand times,