them as you may; they cannot go on coming from a broken heart.
They flow away out of the fissures, and then the dryness and barrenness
of daily misery will not let them come again."

"He never cared as I do," thought Rose; "he does not know what it is!"

She called her persecutor "it"; she shrank from its name even now with
an unutterable embarrassment. When she did turn to Edmund it was more as
if to confide to him what she was suffering from someone else; it was so
habitual to her to turn to him. What was the use? what was the use? How
could she use him against himself? No, no; she must, she must control
herself. She must not tell him; she must let him go quite quietly now;
she must make no appeal to the past; he was too generous--she did not
want his generosity. She put her hands to her forehead and pushed the
hair backwards.

"I'm not well, I think," she said; "the room at the meeting was stuffy.
I--I didn't quite understand what you said--I'm glad."

She sank on to a chair, and then got up again.

"I'm glad you've got what you wanted, but I'm startled--no, I mean I'm
not quite well. I don't think I can talk to-day--I don't
understand--I----"

She stood almost with her back to him then.

He was so amazed at her words that he could not speak at all. This was
not sweetness, kindness, pity; this was something else, something
different; it was almost a shock!

"I am so silly," she said, with a most absurd attempt at a natural
voice, "I think I must----" Her figure swayed a little.

Edmund watched her with utter amazement. All his knowledge of women was
at fault, and that child in the white frock--where was she? Where was
that sense of his soul's history and its failure, its mystic tragedy,
just now? Gone, quite gone, for he knew now that that long tragedy was
ended. But Rose did not know it.

He moved, half consciously, a few feet towards the door.

"Rose," he said, in a very low voice, "if it has come at last, don't
deny it! I have waited patiently, God knows! but I don't want it now
unless it is true. For Heaven's sake do nothing in mere pity!"

"But it has come, Edmund; it has come!" she interrupted him, so quickly
that he had barely time to reach her before she came to him.

And yet it had been many years in coming--so many years that he could
hardly believe it now; could hardly believe that the white hands he had
watched so often trembled with delight as they caressed him; could
hardly believe that