“But my future depends upon you, Muriel,” I cried in despair. “Through years—ever since the old days in Stamford—I have admired you, and as time has progressed, and you have become more beautiful and more refined, my admiration has developed into a true and honest love. Will you never believe me?”
“No,” she answered. “I can never believe you. Besides, we could never be happy, for our paths in life will lie in very different directions.”
“That’s all foolish sentiment,” I exclaimed. “I have to ask permission of no one as to whom I may marry. Why will you not reconsider this decision of yours? You know well—you must have seen long, long ago—that I love you.”
“I have already told you my intention,” she responded with a frigidity of manner that again crushed all hope from my heart. “To-night must be our last night together. Afterwards we must remember one another only as acquaintances.”
“No, no!” I protested. “Don’t say that.”
“It must be,” she responded decisively. All argument appeared useless, so I remained silent.
It was nine o’clock before we left the restaurant, too early for her to return to Madame Gabrielle’s, therefore at my invitation she accompanied me to my chambers, and sat with me in my sitting-room for a long time. So long had we been platonic friends that I could not bring myself to believe that that was really her farewell visit. She sat in the same chair in which Aline had sat on the first night when she had so strangely come into my life, and now again she chatted on merrily, as in the old days, inquiring after mutual friends in Stamford, and what changes had been effected in sleepy, lethargic Duddington. I had told her all the latest gossip of the place, when suddenly I observed—
“Just now everybody in the village is taken up with the new curate.”
“No curate gets on well for very long with old Layton,” she remarked. “Mr Farrar was a splendid preacher, and they said it was because the rector was jealous of his talents that he got rid of him.”
“Yes, Farrar was a clever fellow, but Yelverton, the new man, is an awfully good chap. He was at college with me, and you may judge my astonishment when I met him, after years of separation, in my mother’s drawing-room.”