him, and answered,

"Dearest, I had rather love you as you are than any other man alive.
Time does wonders; perhaps in time you will get over it. Oh! Arthur,
when I think of what she has made you, and what you might have been if
you had never known her, I long to tell that woman all my mind. But
you must be a man, dear; it is weak to give way to a mad passion, such
as this is now. Try to think of something else; work at something."

"I have no heart for it, Mildred, I don't feel as though I could work;
and, if you cannot make me forget, I am sure I do not know what will."

Mildred sighed, and did not answer. Though she spoke hopefully about
it to him, she had little faith in his getting over his passion for
Angela now. Either she must marry him as he was, or else let him go
altogether; but which? The struggle between her affection and her idea
of duty was very sore, and as yet she could come to no conclusion.

One thing there was that troubled her considerably, and this was that,
though Madeira was almost empty, there were enough people in it to get
up a good deal of gossip about herself and Arthur. Now, it would have
been difficult to find anybody more entirely careless of the judgments
of society than Mildred, more especially as her great wealth and
general popularity protected her from slights. But, for all her
oddities, she was a thorough woman of the world; and she knew, none
better, that, in pursuance of an almost invariable natural law, there
is nothing that lowers a woman so much in the estimation of a man as
the knowledge that she is talked about, even though he himself is the
cause of the talk. This may be both illogical and unjust, but it is,
none the less, true.

But, if Mildred still hesitated, Arthur did not. He was very anxious
that they should be married; indeed, he almost insisted on it. The
position was one that was far from being agreeable to him, for all
such intimacies must, from their very nature, necessitate a certain
amount of false swearing. They are throughout an acted lie; and, when
the lie is acted, it must sometimes be spoken. Now, this is a state of
affairs that is repugnant to an honourable man, and one that not
unfrequently becomes perfectly intolerable. Many is the love-affair
that comes to a sudden end because the man finds it impossible to
permanently constitute himself a peregrinating falsehood. But, oddly
enough, it has been found difficult to persuade the other contracting
par