e. It leaked out through private sources, it being
understood that no public announcement was to be made till the marriage
should be imminent. And as Cheveril had departed in his yacht to the
Pacific very shortly after his proposal, there seemed small likelihood
of the union taking place that year.

Meanwhile, her long battle over, Evelyn prepared herself to enjoy her
hard-earned peace. Her father no longer poured hurricanes of wrath upon
her for her obduracy. Her mother's bitter reproaches had wholly ceased.
The home atmosphere had become suddenly calm and sunny. The eldest
daughter of the house had done her obvious duty, and the family was no
longer shaken and upset by internal tumult.

But the peace was only on the surface so far as Evelyn was concerned.
Privately, she was less at peace than she had ever been, and that not on
her own account or on Jim Willowby's. Every letter she received from the
man who had taken her part against himself stirred afresh in her a keen
self-reproach and sense of shame. He wrote to her from every port he
touched, brief, friendly epistles that she might have shown to all the
world, but which she locked away secretly, and read only in solitude.
Her letters to him were even briefer, and she never guessed how Cheveril
cherished those scanty favours.

So through all that summer they kept up the farce. In the autumn Evelyn
went to pay a round of visits at various country-houses, and it was
while staying from home that a letter from Jim Willowby reached her.

He wrote in apparently excellent spirits. He had had an extraordinary
piece of luck, he said, and had been offered a very good post in Burmah.
If she would consent to go out to him, they could be married at once.

That letter Evelyn read during a solitary ramble over a wide Yorkshire
moor, and when she looked up from the boy's signature her expression was
hunted, even tragic.

Jim had carefully considered ways and means. The thing she had longed
for was within her grasp. All she had ever asked for herself was flung
to her without stint.

But--what had happened to her? she wondered vaguely--she realised it all
fully, completely, yet with no thrill of gladness. Something subtly
potent seemed wound about her heart, holding her back; something that
was stronger far than the thought of Jim was calling to her, crying
aloud across the barren deserts of her soul. And in that moment she knew
that her marriage with Jim had become a final im