Catharine knew what Tom did not know. She was perfectly sure that the accusation against him was the result of the supposed discovery of their love for one another. If she had denied it promptly nothing perhaps would have happened. It was all due to her, then. She gazed up the stream; the leaden clouds drove on; the leaden water lay rippled; the willows and the rushes, vexed with the bitter blast, bent themselves continually. She turned and took her ring off her finger. "It can never be," she slowly said; "here is my ring; you may keep it, but while I am alive you must never wear it." Tom took it mechanically, bent his head over the parapet, and his anguish broke out in sobs and tears. Catharine took his hand in hers, leaned over him, and whispered: "Tom, listen--I shall never be any man's wife." Before he could say another word she had gone, and he felt that he should never see her again. What makes the peculiar pang of parting? The coach comes up; the friend mounts; there is the wave of a handkerchief. I follow him to the crest of the hill; he disappears, and I am left to walk down the dusty lane alone. Am I melancholy simply because I shall not see him for a month or a year? She whom I have loved for half a life lies dying. I kiss her and bid her good-bye. Is the bare loss the sole cause of my misery, my despair, breeding that mad longing that I myself might die? In all parting there is something infinite. We see in it a symbol of the order of the universe, and it is because that death-bed farewell stands for so much that we break down. "If it pleases God," says Swift to Pope, "to restore me to my health, I shall readily make a third journey; if not, we must part _as all human creatures have parted_." As all human creatures have parted! Swift did not say that by way of consolation. Tom turned homewards. Catharine's last words were incessantly in his mind. What they meant he knew not and could not imagine, but in the midst of his trouble rose up something not worth calling joy, a little thread of water in the waste: it was a little relief that nobody was preferred before him, and that nobody would possess what to him was denied. He told his father, and found his faith unshakable. There was a letter for him in a handwriting he thought he knew, but he was not quite sure. It was as follows:--