But of all the human beings collected in the Town Hall that afternoon, perhaps no two were less capable of violating the spirit of the moral and social law whereof the letter is so sacred to the ubiquitous and lynx-eyed Mrs. Grundy, who persists in suspecting everyone of a desire to evade or infringe it, simply for the sake of doing so, whenever he or she is presented with an opportunity. That they loved one another as much as it was possible for sympathetic hearts to love, and that they seized one brief half-hour out of a lifetime of separation in which to say farewell, might have been reprehensible from the conventional point of view; but then the conventional point of view does not embrace the universe, by a very long way. He came down the hall, and round to her chair, and she drew her dress close that he might sit down beside her. She was too innately pure to make any mere outward and artificial demonstrations of modesty in such a moment as this; and she trusted him too well to be afraid of him. She put out her hand, and he took it in a long, close clasp; and they looked at one another the while with loving, despairing eyes, which said, "Oh, Rachel, why _did_ you?" and "Oh, Roden, forgive me!" and bridged the only gulf that could be bridged between them, without any help of words. And then, though the organ began to fill the air with the sonorous crash and thunder of Bach's great pedal fugue in D, they heard nothing but the beating of their hearts, and the memories that called to them from their brief past, vibrating through the void and silence of a world in which they were alone together. When the music ceased for an interval, Mr. Dalrymple rested his arm on the back of the chair which had served Rachel for a footstool, and looking into her face, said under his breath, "Gordon gave me your message--I came down to thank you--and I thought we should get on better if we could see each other just once. Dear, we must try and comfort ourselves with knowing that neither of us played the other false." "_I_ did--_I_ did," she whispered hurriedly. "I ought to have trusted you, Roden." "Yes--that was a mistake. But you did not know any better, poor child. And they were too many for you, those people. Gordon ought to have insisted on seeing you, himself, or getting some message to you, and not have left you in their hands. But he did his best, he says. He was too anxious to get back to me to have much patience over it, and he didn't bargain for being told lies of that magnitude in cold blood. However,--however----" He broke off and looked at her with a passion of love and grief in his eyes that he dared not trust to speech. And she looked back at him, with her simple soul laid bare--longing to make him know, if they were never to be together like this again, how absolutely in her heart she had been true to him. _She_ would not tell him a lie, at any rate.