at you mean. If I cannot act Elvira, I am
good for nothing--I am worse than good for nothing--I am an impostor, a
sham!'

She sat down on the raised edge of the bank, for she was trembling, and
clasped her quivering hands on her knees. Kendal was beside himself with
distress. How had he blundered so, and what had brought this about? It
was so unexpected, it was incredible.

'Do--do believe me!' he exclaimed, bending over her. 'I never meant
anything the least disrespectful to you; I never dreamt of it. You asked
me to give you my true opinion, and my criticism applied much more to the
play than to yourself. Think nothing of it, if you yourself are
persuaded. You must know much better than I can what will suit you. And
as for Wallace--Wallace will be proud to let you do what you will with
his play.'

It seemed to him that he would have said anything in the world to soothe
her. It was so piteous, so intolerable to him to watch that quivering
lip.

'Ah, yes,' she said, looking up, a dreary smile flitting over her face,
'I know you didn't mean to wound me; but it was there, your feeling; I
saw it at once. I might have seen it, if I hadn't been a fool, in Mr.
Wallace's manner. I did see it. It's only what every one whose opinion is
worth having is beginning to say. My acting has been a nightmare to me
lately. I believe it has all been a great, great mistake.'

Kendal never felt a keener hatred of the conventions which rule the
relations between men and women. Could he only simply have expressed his
own feeling, he would have knelt beside her on the path, have taken the
trembling hands in his own, and comforted her as a woman would have done.
But as it was, he could only stand stiff and awkward before her, and yet
it seemed to him as if the whole world had resolved itself into his own
individuality and hers, and as if the gay river party and the bright
friendly relations of an hour before were separated from the present by
an impassable gulf. And, worst of all, there seemed to be a strange
perversity in his speech--a fate which drove him into betraying every
here and there his own real standpoint whether he would or no.

'You must not say such things,' he said, as calmly as he could. 'You have
charmed the English public as no one else has ever charmed it. Is not
that a great thing to have done? And if I, who am very fastidious and
very captious, and over-critical in a hundred ways--if I am inclined to
think that a part