hatic statement, "that he
bears your grandfather's name, and so will the child that is to be
born. The poor boy is not so much to blame as the woman who deluded him,
thinking him a gentleman, which he IS, and having money, which he has
NOT."

"What would Ralph Denham say to this?" thought Katharine, beginning to
pace up and down her bedroom. She twitched aside the curtains, so that,
on turning, she was faced by darkness, and looking out, could just
distinguish the branches of a plane-tree and the yellow lights of some
one else's windows.

"What would Mary Datchet and Ralph Denham say?" she reflected, pausing
by the window, which, as the night was warm, she raised, in order to
feel the air upon her face, and to lose herself in the nothingness of
night. But with the air the distant humming sound of far-off crowded
thoroughfares was admitted to the room. The incessant and tumultuous
hum of the distant traffic seemed, as she stood there, to represent
the thick texture of her life, for her life was so hemmed in with the
progress of other lives that the sound of its own advance was inaudible.
People like Ralph and Mary, she thought, had it all their own way, and
an empty space before them, and, as she envied them, she cast her mind
out to imagine an empty land where all this petty intercourse of men and
women, this life made up of the dense crossings and entanglements of men
and women, had no existence whatever. Even now, alone, at night, looking
out into the shapeless mass of London, she was forced to remember that
there was one point and here another with which she had some connection.
William Rodney, at this very moment, was seated in a minute speck of
light somewhere to the east of her, and his mind was occupied, not with
his book, but with her. She wished that no one in the whole world
would think of her. However, there was no way of escaping from one's
fellow-beings, she concluded, and shut the window with a sigh, and
returned once more to her letters.

She could not doubt but that William's letter was the most genuine she
had yet received from him. He had come to the conclusion that he could
not live without her, he wrote. He believed that he knew her, and
could give her happiness, and that their marriage would be unlike other
marriages. Nor was the sonnet, in spite of its accomplishment, lacking
in passion, and Katharine, as she read the pages through again, could
see in what direction her feelings ought to flow, s