"I do not reproach you," he interrupted. "It is my own folly, my own fault! But I have lived on this hope; it is all the life I have. You do not withdraw it utterly? May I not think that in time—"
"No—no—I have no intention of ever marrying again. I—I—was not—not—happy."
"But I am different—" he hesitated. He could not exactly find words to protest his conviction of his superiority to her husband, a man she had loved once. "I mean—we are congenial. I am very considerably older; I am nearly thirty-one. My views in life are fixed, definite; my occupation is settled. Might not—"
"I am sorry, Captain Baynell; I would not willingly add to the unhappiness, real or imaginary, of any one—but all this is worse than useless. I must ask you not to recur to the subject. And now I must leave you, for the 'ladies' are going to bed, and I must hear them say their prayers."
He seemed about to detain her with further protestations, then desisted, evidently with a hopeless realization of futility.
"Ask them to remember me in their petitions," he only said with a dreary sort of smile.
He had always seemed to love the "ladies" fraternally, with lenient admiration, and she liked this tender little domestic trait in the midst of his unyielding gravity and inexorable stiffness. She hesitated in the moonlight with some stir of genuine sympathy, and held out her hand as she passed. He caught it and covered it with kisses. She drew it hastily from him, and Baynell was left alone on the balcony; the scene before him, the vernal glamours of the moon, the umbrageous trees, the sweet spring flowers, the sheen of the river, the bivouacs of the hills, the fort on the height,—these things seemed unrealities and mere shadows as he faced the fragments of that nullity, his broken dream, the only positive actuality in all his life.