She did not look up, but the blood flew over her face.
"I did not say I didn't want to," she murmured. "Of course I want to—not yet, for a long time, but some day—or I should not be engaged."
"I don't think that always follows, Miss Fetherstonhaugh. I think many people engage themselves, and live to think better of it. And then, if they don't refuse to consummate an admitted mistake, they—well, they ought to, that's all. Forgive me, I am speaking in the abstract of course. I have had a great deal of experience, you know."
"Of broken engagements?" queried Rachel, smiling faintly at the fire.
"No, not of them—not personally. The curse of my life was an engagement that was kept. And I have seen so much misery, such everlasting wreck and ruin, come upon people I have known and cared for—people who kept the letter of the law of honour and disregarded the spirit—who preferred sacrificing all that made life worth having, for certainly two people, and probably four, to breaking an engagement that had no longer any sense or reason in it."
"But surely an engagement—it is the initial marriage ceremony—should be kept sacred," protested Rachel, daring at last to look up, in defence of pious principles.
"Yes," he said, "certainly—when it is really the initial marriage ceremony."
"And how—what—what is the proof of that?"
"Shall I tell you what I think it is? When the people who are engaged long and weary for the consummation—for the time to be over which keeps them from one another."
There was a dead silence. Rachel continued to gaze into the fire, but her eyes were dim, and all her pretty colour sank out of her face. He had given her a great shock, and she had to take a little time to recover. Presently she looked up, pale and grave, with a fuller and more open look than she had ever given him.