e did not care for him? In a flash the conviction that
not to care is the uttermost sin of all stamped itself upon her inmost
thought; and she felt herself branded for ever.

He had taken her arm, and held her hand firmly in his, nor had she the
force to resist what now seemed to her his enormously superior strength.
Very well; she would submit, as her mother and her aunt and most women,
perhaps, had submitted; and yet she knew that every second of such
submission to his strength was a second of treachery to him.

"I did say I would marry you, but it was wrong," she forced herself
to say, and she stiffened her arm as if to annul even the seeming
submission of that separate part of her; "for I don't love you,
William; you've noticed it, every one's noticed it; why should we go on
pretending? When I told you I loved you, I was wrong. I said what I knew
to be untrue."

As none of her words seemed to her at all adequate to represent what
she felt, she repeated them, and emphasized them without realizing
the effect that they might have upon a man who cared for her. She was
completely taken aback by finding her arm suddenly dropped; then she saw
his face most strangely contorted; was he laughing, it flashed across
her? In another moment she saw that he was in tears. In her bewilderment
at this apparition she stood aghast for a second. With a desperate sense
that this horror must, at all costs, be stopped, she then put her arms
about him, drew his head for a moment upon her shoulder, and led him on,
murmuring words of consolation, until he heaved a great sigh. They held
fast to each other; her tears, too, ran down her cheeks; and were both
quite silent. Noticing the difficulty with which he walked, and feeling
the same extreme lassitude in her own limbs, she proposed that they
should rest for a moment where the bracken was brown and shriveled
beneath an oak-tree. He assented. Once more he gave a great sigh, and
wiped his eyes with a childlike unconsciousness, and began to speak
without a trace of his previous anger. The idea came to her that they
were like the children in the fairy tale who were lost in a wood, and
with this in her mind she noticed the scattering of dead leaves all
round them which had been blown by the wind into heaps, a foot or two
deep, here and there.

"When did you begin to feel this, Katharine?" he said; "for it isn't
true to say that you've always felt it. I admit I was unreasonable
the first night