gravely. "I do not share your
real life. I do not help you where your brain works, in the plans and
purposes and hopes that lie behind all that you do--oh, yes, I know your
ambitions and what positions you are aiming for; but there is something
more than that. There is the object of it all, the pulse of it, the
machinery down, down deep in your being that drives it all. Oh, I am not
a child! I have some intellect, and I want--I want that we should work
it out together."

In spite of all that had come and gone, in spite of the dead mother's
words and all her own convictions, seeing trouble coming upon him, she
wanted to make one last effort for what might save their lives--her
life--from shipwreck in the end. If she failed now, she foresaw a
bitter, cynical figure working out his life with a narrowing soul, a
hard spirit unrelieved by the softening influence of a great love--even
yet the woman in her had a far-off hope that, where the law had made
them one by book and scrip, the love which should consecrate such a
union, lift it above an almost offensive relation, might be theirs. She
did not know how much of her heart, of her being, was wandering over
the distant sands of Egypt, looking for its oasis. Eglington had never
needed or wanted more than she had given him--her fortune, her person,
her charm, her ability to play an express and definite part in his
career. It was this material use to which she was so largely assigned,
almost involuntarily but none the less truly, that had destroyed all of
the finer, dearer, more delicate intimacy invading his mind sometimes,
more or less vaguely, where Faith was concerned. So extreme was his
egotism that it had never occurred to him, as it had done to the Duchess
of Snowdon and Lord Windlehurst, that he might lose Hylda herself as
well as her fortune; that the day might come when her high spirit could
bear it no longer. As the Duchess of Snowdon had said: "It would all
depend upon the other man, whoever he might be."

So he answered her with superficial cheerfulness now; he had not the
depth of soul to see that they were at a crisis, and that she could bear
no longer the old method of treating her as though she were a child, to
be humoured or to be dominated.

"Well, you see all there is," he answered; "you are so imaginative,
crying for some moon there never was in any sky."

In part he had spoken the truth. He had no high objects or ends or
purposes. He wanted only succes