you
appealed to yesterday has been of long growth. You know perfectly well
what havoc a thing of this kind may make in a girl's life. I don't say
it will. But, at any rate, it is all so desperately serious I could not
hold my hand. I am doing what is no doubt wholly unconventional; but I
am your friend and her brother; I brought you together, and I ask you to
take me into counsel. If you had but done it before!'

There was a moment's dead silence.

'You cannot pretend to believe,' said Langham, at last, with the same
sombre self-containedness, 'that a marriage with me would be for your
sister-in-law's happiness?'

'I don't know what to believe!' cried Robert. 'No,' he added frankly,
'no; when I saw you first attracted by Rose at Murewell I disliked the
idea heartily; I was glad to see you separated; _a priori_, I never
thought you suited to each other. But reasoning that holds good when
a thing is wholly in the air, looks very different when a man has
committed himself and another, as you have done.'

Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair impatiently from
his eyes and rose from his bending position by the fire.

'Elsmere, there is nothing to be said! I have behaved as vilely as
you please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I should be an even
greater fiend and weakling than you think me, if, in cold blood, I
could let your sister run the risk of marrying me. I could not trust
myself--you may think of the statement as you like--I should make her
_miserable_. Last night I had not parted from her an hour, before I
was utterly and irrevocably sure of it. My habits are any masters. I
believe,'--he added slowly, his eyes fixed weirdly on something beyond
Robert, 'I could even grow to _hate_ what came between me and them!'

Was it the last word of the man's life? It struck Robert with a kind of
shiver.

'Pray heaven,' he said with a groan, getting up to go, you may not have
made her miserable already!'

'Did it hurt her so much?' asked Langham, almost inaudibly, turning
away, Robert's tone meanwhile calling up a new and scorching image in
the subtle brain tissue.

'I have not seen her,' said Robert abruptly; 'but when I came in, I
found my wife--who has no light tears--weeping for her sister.'

His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in truth too
pitiful and too intimate for speech.

Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask again.

'Good-by!' said Robert, taking u