“How can I stay? A year younger than your own daughter, I cannot stand in my rightful place—nor would I, if I could.”
“Nigel, stay as my son.”
“How can I? I am not your son, and I will not be a rich woman’s protégé. I may have no capacity for love, but I have honour. I shall go, as I came, empty and alone. I will take nothing with me from this great house which you tell me is, in reality, my own.”
“Nigel, there is one thing you must take with you. It was your tenderest gift to me. It has been so precious all these years; but now I have forfeited the right to wear it.”
She drew her wedding-ring from her finger.
“I have failed you, utterly.”
She held it out to him.
“The golden circlet, emblem of a love which is eternal, would mock me in my hopeless desolation. Take it, Nigel. It is all you can do for me. When you placed it on my finger, you had just said: ‘Till death us do part’; and death has parted us.”
“Not death,” he said. “Life has parted us, not death.”
A heavy sense of sorrow and compunction gripped him.