Her heart cried out that she must go; that every hour of intercourse
with him was fraught with peril. The fact that his lips were sealed
availed her nothing; for these two had long since passed that danger
point in platonic friendship when words are discarded for more direct
communing of soul with soul. Theo could read every look in her eyes,
every tone of her voice, like an open book, and she knew it; though
she had never acknowledged it till now. All unconsciously he would
wrest her secret from her by force of sympathetic insight; and she,
who implicitly believed in God, who held suicide to be the most
dastardly sin a human being can commit, knew that she would take her
own life without hesitation rather than stand proven disloyal to
Evelyn, disgraced in the eyes of the man she loved. She did not think
this thing in detail. She merely knew it, with the instinctive
certainty of a vehement temperament that feels and knows apart from
all need of words.

Her character had been moulded by men--simple, upright men; and she
had imbibed their hard-and-fast notions of honour, of right and wrong.
She had power to turn her back upon her love, to live out her life as
though it were not, on two conditions only. No one must ever suspect
the truth. No one but herself must suffer because of it. Conditions
hard to be fulfilled.

"Oh, _Theo_!"

The cry broke from her unawares--a throb of the heart made vocal. It
roused her to reality, to the fact that she had been standing rigidly
in the middle of the room,--how long she knew not,--seeing nothing,
hearing nothing, but the voice of her tormented soul.

She went forward mechanically to the dressing-table, and leaning her
hands upon it, looked long and searchingly into her own face. Her
pallor, the ivory sheen of her dress, and the unnatural lustre of her
eyes, gave her reflection a ghostly aspect in the dim light; and she
shuddered. Was this to be the end of her high hopes and ideals,--of
her resolute waiting and longing and praying for the very best that
life and love could give? Was it actually she,--John's sister--her
father's daughter--who had succumbed to this undreamed-of wrong?

At thought of them, and of their great pride in her, all her strained
composure went to pieces. She sank into a chair and pressed both hands
against her face. But no tears forced their way between her fingers. A
girl reared by four brothers is not apt to fall a-weeping upon every
provocation; and