“Forgive you! Why, my dear child, you have been freely forgiven from the hour in which we parted. I thought it best and wisest to end a union which had been too lightly made. It is possible I was wrong. Unhappily, I had exhausted my fund of hope before I met you, and had acquired an unpleasant knack of expecting the worst in every situation of life. I did not take those letters as conclusive evidence of guilt; on the contrary, I was quite able to believe their existence was compatible with innocence. But I told myself that such letters must be the beginning of the end, and I took prompt steps to avert an impending catastrophe. I did not want to be a spectacle to men and angels as the husband of a runaway wife. ‘There shall be no running away,’ I said. ‘We will shake hands, and take our separate roads, without noise or scandal.’ I suppose it was a selfish policy; and again I am reduced to say, forgive me.” After this Mr. Jerningham spoke no more of the past. He talked of his wife’s health, her future movements. He tried to inspire her with hope of amendment, in spite of her physician’s ominous looks, her own instincts; nothing could be kinder or more delicate than the manner in which he expressed himself both to Emily and to Mrs. Colton, who came in from the garden presently, and whom he thanked, with emphasis, for her devotion to his wife. A quarter of an hour afterwards he was seated alone in a railway carriage, speeding London-wards by express train, and meditating profoundly upon the interview at River Lawn. “Dying,” he said to himself; “of that there can be no doubt. Of all the hazards of fate, this was the last I should have expected. And I shall be free; free to marry again, if I could conceive so wild a folly; free to marry Helen de Bergerac; free to inflict the maximum of misery upon an innocent girl, in order to secure for myself the minimum of happiness. And yet, O God, what happiness there might be in such a union, if I could be loved again as I once was loved!” He clasped his hands, and the day-dreamer’s ecstasy brightened his face for a moment. The setting sun shone red upon the river over which the train was speeding, and Harold Jerningham remembered such a rosy summer sunset five-and-twenty years ago, and a sweet girl-face looking up at him, transfigured by a girl’s pure love. CHAPTER IX. TIMELY BANISHMENT. BEFORE Eustace Thorburn could nerve himself for the self-sacrificial act which was to accomplish his banishment from that Berkshire Eden known as Greenlands, Fate took the doing of the deed out of his hands, and brought about his departure in the simplest and most natural manner.