eatest part of my jewellery thinking that one day I would be your
wife; you would not have given me so much if you had not thought so.
Therefore I feel it is only just to offer you the whole of it back. I
will only ask you to allow me to keep a few trifles--the earrings you
bought for me the day we arrived in Paris, the mummy's ring, etc., not
more than half-a-dozen things in all. I should like to keep these in
memory of a time which I ought to forget, but which I am afraid I shall
never have the courage even to try to forget. Dear Owen, I cannot tell
you why I cannot marry you, I only know that I cannot. I am obeying an
instinct far stronger than I, and I cannot struggle against it any
longer.

"One day perhaps we may meet--but it may not be for years, until we are
both quite different.

"Sincerely yours,

"EVELYN INNES."

The moment she had written the address, she threw the pen aside, and she
sat striving against an uncontrollable sense of misery. At last her
pent-up tears ran over her eyelids. She flung herself on her bed, and
lay weeping, shaken by short, choking sobs. All her courage of the
morning had forsaken her; she could not face her new life, she could not
send away Owen. Her inmost life rose in revolt. Why was this new
sacrifice demanded of her? Why was her life to be made so hard, so
impossible for her to endure? She felt she could not live in the life
which she foresaw awaited her. Then she felt that she was being tried
beyond the endurance of any woman. But the storm did not last, her sobs
died away. She sat up, mopping her eyes with a soaking pocket
handkerchief, and utterly exhausted by the violence of her emotions, she
began to undress. She felt the impossibility of saying her prayers, her
one longing was for sleep, oblivion; she wished herself dead, and was
too worn out to put the thought from her, though she knew it was wrong.

In the morning the first thing she saw was the letter to Owen. There it
was! And every word and letter sank into her brain. "Sir Owen Asher,
Bart., Riversdale, Northamptonshire." She would have to post it, and
never again would she see him. She questioned the right of the priest in
obtaining from her a promise not to see him, so long as she did not sin.
But Owen was an approximate cause of mortal sin....

Ashamed of her instability, and feeling herself unworthy and no longer
pure as absolution had made her, she went that afternoon to St.
Joseph's, and in confession lai