"Yes, Enid, I am. I am ill, and I am afraid there is no cure for the disease. I have not been home. In fact, I have been in the park all night. I was shut in by accident, and I remained from choice, trying to think out my duty to you."
"Oh, nonsense!" she replied. "I know what you mean. It's about you getting drunk the other night—and—and your unfortunate mother and this newly-found half-sister of yours. Well, of course, I suppose it was exceedingly wrong of you to get so very drunk. And the rest—I mean about your mother—that is very sad and terrible. But, bad as it is, I think you are taking it a great deal too seriously. I've talked it all over with mamma, and she thinks just as I do about it."
When she had said this Enid felt that she had gone quite as far as her self-respect and maidenly pride would permit her to go. As she looked up at him she saw the pallor of his face change almost to grey. His hand was resting lightly on her arm, and she felt it tremble. Then he drew it gently away and said:
"I know what you mean, Enid, and it is altogether too good and generous of you; but I don't think you quite understand—I mean, you don't seem to realise how serious it all is."
"Really, Vane, I must say that you are acting very strangely. What is the good of going all over it again? You can't tell me anything more, I suppose, than I have heard already from mamma. Surely you don't mean that you intend that everything is to be over between us—that we are only to be friends, as they say, in future?"
"I quite see what you mean," he said, his lips perceptibly tightening; "and that, too, in a certain sense, is what I mean also."
"What!" she exclaimed. "Do you really mean that I am not to be any more what I have been to you, and that if we meet again it must only be as ordinary acquaintances, just friends who have known each other a certain number of years? Surely, Vane, you don't mean that—dear?"
The last word escaped her lips almost involuntarily. She tried to keep it back, but it got out in spite of herself. It was only the fact that they were walking on the public highway that prevented her from giving way altogether to the sense of despair that had come over her. As his face had changed a few moments before so did hers now, and as she looked at him he stopped momentarily in his walk.
But the lessons which he had learnt during the last few days, and most of all during this last night of lonely wandering and desperate questioning with himself, had ground the moral into his soul so deeply that not even the sight of her so anxiously longing for just one word from him to bring them together again, and make them once more as they had always been—almost since either of them could remember anything—was strong enough to force him to speak it.
He involuntarily wheeled the bicycle towards the middle of the road, as though he was afraid to trust himself too near her, and said, speaking as a man might speak when pronouncing his own death sentence: