should decidedly say you couldn't break your engagement too soon. In
fact, there wouldn't be any real engagement to break."

"Of course you are right," said Glendenning, but not so strenuously as
he might.

I had a feeling that he had not put forward the main cause of his
unhappiness, though he had given a true cause; that he had made some
lesser sense of wrong stand for a greater, as people often do in
confessing themselves; and I was not surprised when he presently added:
"It is not merely the fact that she is bound in that way, and that her
young life is passing in this sort of hopeless patience, but
that--that--I don't know how to put the ugly and wicked thing into
words, but I assure you that sometimes when I think--when I'm aware that
I know--Ah, I can't say it!"

"I fancy I understand what you mean, my dear boy," I said, and in the
right of my ten years' seniority I put my hand caressingly on his
shoulder, "and you are no more guilty than I am in knowing that if Mrs.
Bentley were not in the way there would be no obstacle to your
happiness."

"But such a cognition is of hell," he cried, and he let his face fall
into his hands and sobbed heartrendingly.

"Yes," I said, "such a cognition is of hell; you are quite right. So are
all evil concepts and knowledges; but so long as they are merely things
of our intelligence, they are no part of us, and we are not guilty of
them."

"No; I trust not, I trust not," he returned, and I let him sob his
trouble out before I spoke again; and then I began with a laugh of
unfeigned gayety. Something that my wife had hinted in one of our talks
about the lovers freakishly presented itself to my mind, and I said,
"There is a way, and a very practical way, to put an end to the anomaly
you feel in an engagement which doesn't imply a marriage."

"And what is that?" he asked, not very hopefully; but he dried his eyes
and calmed himself.

"Well, speaking after the manner of men, you might run off with Miss
Bentley."

All the blood in his body flushed into his face. "Don't!" he gasped, and
I divined that what I had said must have been in his thoughts before,
and I laughed again. "It wouldn't do," he added, piteously. "The
scandal--I am a clergyman, and my parish--"

I perceived that no moral scruple presented itself to him; when it came
to the point, he was simply and naturally a lover, like any other man;
and I persisted: "It would only be a seven days' wonder. I never heard