begin again to walk along homeward, but
slowly this time.

"We have made a mistake, perhaps," he says, presently, still speaking
with the same slow and ruminating sadness in his tone. "The inscrutable
God alone knows why He permits his creatures to mar all their seventy
years by one short false step--yes--a _mistake_!"

(Ah me! ah me! I always mistrusted those laurestines! They sent me back
my brother churlish and embittered, but oh! that in my steadfast Roger
they should have worked such a sudden deadly change!)

"Is it more a mistake," I cry, bursting out into irrepressible anger,
"than it was two hours ago, when I left you at that gate? You did not
seem to think it a mistake _then_--at least you hid it very well, if you
did"--(then going on quickly, seeing that he is about to interrupt
me)--"have you been _comparing notes_, pray? Has _she_ found it a
mistake, too?"

"Yes, _that_ she has! Poor soul! God help her!" he answers,
compassionately.

Something in the pity of his tone jars frightfully on my strung nerves.

"If God has to help all the poor souls who have made mistakes, He will
have his hands full!" I retort, bitterly.

Another silence. We are drawing near the pleasure-grounds--the great
rhododendron belt that shelters the shrubbery from the east wind.

"Nancy," says Roger, again stopping, and facing me too. This time he
does not put his hands on my shoulders; the melancholy is still in his
eyes, but there is no longer any harshness. They repossess their natural
kindly benignity. "Though it is perhaps impossible that there should be
between us that passionate love that there might be between people that
are nearer each other in age--more fitly mated--yet there is no reason
why we should not _like_ each other very heartily, is there, dear? why
there should not be between us absolute confidence, perfect
frankness--that is the great thing, is not it?"

He is looking with such intense wistfulness at me, that I turn away. Why
should not there be passionate love between us? Who is there but himself
to hinder it? So I make no answer.

"I dare say," he says, taking my right hand, and holding it with a cool
and kindly clasp, "that you think it difficult--next door to
impossible--for two people, one at the outset, one almost on the
confines of life, to enter very understandingly into each other's
interests! No doubt the thought that I--being so much ahead of you in
years"--(sighing again heavily)--"cannot se