his--his wife, it will come too late. You are made for
love, Joan, just as he is. You could not live your life without it--you
would feel need for it. Oh yes, you think I am a child, a foolish,
romantic schoolgirl, a stupid little thing, talking, talking, but in
your heart you know that I am right."

"But if he--loves me," Joan said softly, "if he loves me, little Ellice,
then how can I break my word to him?"

"I do not ask you to break your word to him, only tell him, tell him the
truth again. Tell him what I have told you, tell him--if there is
someone else, if you have already met someone you care for--tell him
that too, so that he will know how impossible it must ever be that you
will give him the love he hoped to win. Tell him that, be frank and
truthful. Remember, it is for all your lives--all his life and all
yours. When he realises that your heart can never be his, do you think
he will not surfer more, will not his sufferings be longer drawn out
than if you told him so frankly now? If the break was to come now, to
come and be ended for ever--but to live together, to live a mock life,
to live beneath the same roof, to share one another's lives, and yet
know one another's souls to be miles and miles apart--oh, Joan, you
would suffer, and he too, he perhaps even more than you."

"And you love him?" Joan said softly. "You love him, Ellice?"

"With all my heart and soul. I would die for him. It--it sounds foolish,
this sort of thing is foolish, the kind of words a silly girl would say,
yet it is the truth."

"I think it is," Joan said. "But then, dear, if he loves me, he could
not love you?"

"I think he might," Ellice said softly.

She was thinking of the morning, of the look she had seen in his eyes,
the awakening look of a man who sees things he has been blind to.

"I think he might," her heart echoed. "I think he might, in time, in a
little time." And did not know, could not guess, that even at this
moment Johnny Everard, sitting alone in his little study with untended
papers strewn about him, was thinking of her--thinking of the look he
had seen in her eyes that very day, out in the sunshine of the fields.

"So you came to me to tell me. It was brave of you?"

"I had to come. I could not have come if you had been different from
what you are."

"Then, even though I am taking away the man you love from you, you do
not hate me?"

"Hate you? Sometimes I think I wished I could--but I could not. If I had