His face appeared to her like something floating in the air, his voice vibrated and rang about her in circles of sound. She drew her hand almost violently away, and withdrew a little, gazing at him half stupified, yet with a keen impatience and intolerance in her disturbed mind. “I accept,” she said hoarsely, with a sense of mortification and intense indignant shame, which was stronger than any sensation Effie had ever felt in her life before. _That_ was what he thought of her; this man for whom she had meant to sacrifice herself! She began hastily to draw off the ring which he had given her from her finger, which, slight as it was, seemed to grow larger with her excitement and tremulousness, and made the operation difficult. “Take it,” she said, holding out the ring to him. “It is yours, not mine.” “No, no,” he said, putting back her extended hand softly, “not that. If we part, don’t let it be in anger, Effie. Keep that at least, for a recollection--for a token----” She scarcely heard what words he used. It was he who had the better of it, she felt. She was angry, disappointed, rejected. Was not that what everybody would think? She held the ring in her hand for a moment, then let it drop from her fingers. It fell with a dull sound on the carpet at his feet. Then she turned round, somehow controlling her impulse to cry out, to rush away, and walked to the door. “I never expected she would have shown that sense and judgment,” said Mrs. Ogilvie, after she had shown the visitor, whose exit was even more hasty than his arrival, and his feelings far from comfortable, to the door. She sat down at her writing table at once with that practical sense and readiness which never forsook her. “Now I will just write and ask Ronald to his dinner,” she said. CHAPTER XXV. But things did not go so easily as Mrs. Ogilvie supposed. Effie had received a blow which was not easily forgotten. The previous mistakes of her young career might have been forgotten, and it is possible that she might have come to be tolerably happy in the settling down and evaporation of all young thoughts and dreams, had she in the fervour of her first impulse become Fred Dirom’s wife. It would not have been the happiness of her ideal, but it often happens that an evanescent splendour like that which illumines the early world dies away with comparative harmlessness, and leaves a very good substitute of solid satisfaction on a secondary level, with which all but the visionary learn to be content.