isn't fair to you," she
murmured.

He protested that anything was better than no, and his protest was
manifestly eager and sincere; but a touch of resentment could not be kept
out of his voice. She should have a reason to give him, something he
could combat, disprove, or ridicule; she gave him no opening, he could
not answer an objection that she would not formulate. He pressed this on
her and she made no attempt to defend herself, merely repeating that she
could not say yes now.

"I've lost you, I suppose, and no doubt I shall be very sorry," she said.

At that he came up to her again.

"You haven't lost me and you never will," he said. "I'll come to you
again before long. I think you're strange to-day, not quite yourself, not
quite the old May. It's as if something had got between us. Well, I'll
wait till it gets out of the way again."

Not so much his words as his voice and his eyes told her of a love deeper
in him and stronger than she had given him credit for; he lived so much
in repression and exercised so careful a guard over any display of
feeling. She liked the repression no less than the feeling and was again
drawn towards him.

"I wish I could," she murmured. "Honestly, I wish I could."

He pressed her no more; if he had, she might possibly at last have given
a reluctant assent. That he would not have, even had it been in his power
to gain it.

"I'll come back--after the holidays," he said.

She looked up and met his glance.

"Yes, after the holidays," she repeated absently.

"You go to Ashwood?"

There was a pause before she answered. It came into her mind suddenly
that it would have been strange to go to Ashwood as Weston Marchmont's
promised wife. Why she could not quite tell; perhaps because such a
position would set her very much outside of all that was being thought
and talked of there, indeed in a quasi-antagonism to it. Anyhow the
position would make her feel quite differently towards it all.

"Yes," she answered at last, and mustered a laugh as she added, "I'm not
so particular as you, you know. And Amy wants me."

"I wish you always did what people want you to," said he, smiling.

Their parting was in this lighter vein, although on his side still tender
and on hers penitent. In both was a consciousness of not understanding,
of being somehow apart, of an inexplicable difficulty in taking one
another's point of view. The solution of sympathy, the break that May had
talked of, made i