Caroline was stooping forward to him. Her figure straightened: “Good Heaven, Evan! you are not going to take it on yourself? Rose!—she will hate you.” “God help me!” he cried internally. “Oh, Evan, darling! consider, reflect!” She fell on her knees, catching his hand. “It is worse for us that you should suffer, dearest! Think of the dreadful meanness and baseness of what you will have to acknowledge.” “Yes!” sighed the youth, and his eyes, in his extreme pain, turned to the Countess reproachfully. “Think, dear,” Caroline hurried on, “he gains nothing for whom you do this—you lose all. It is not your deed. You will have to speak an untruth. Your ideas are wrong—wrong, I know they are. You will have to lie. But if you are silent, the little, little blame that may attach to us will pass away, and we shall be happy in seeing our brother happy.” “You are talking to Evan as if he had religion,” said the Countess, with steady sedateness. And at that moment, from the sublimity of his pagan virtue, the young man groaned for some pure certain light to guide him: the question whether he was about to do right made him weak. He took Caroline’s head between his two hands, and kissed her mouth. The act brought Rose to his senses insufferably, and she—his Goddess of truth and his sole guiding light—spurred him afresh. “My family’s dishonour is mine, Caroline. Say nothing more—don’t think of me. I go to Lady Jocelyn tonight. To-morrow we leave, and there’s the end. Louisa, if you have any new schemes for my welfare, I beg you to renounce them.” “Gratitude I never expected from a Dawley!” the Countess retorted. “Oh, Louisa! he is going!” cried Caroline; “kneel to him with me: stop him: Rose loves him, and he is going to make her hate him.” “You can’t talk reason to one who’s mad,” said the Countess, more like the Dawley she sprang from than it would have pleased her to know. “My darling! My own Evan! it will kill me,” Caroline exclaimed, and passionately imploring him, she looked so hopelessly beautiful, that Evan was agitated, and caressed her, while he said, softly: “Where our honour is not involved I would submit to your smallest wish.” “It involves my life—my destiny!” murmured Caroline. Could he have known the double meaning in her words, and what a saving this sacrifice of his was to accomplish, he would not have turned to do it feeling abandoned of heaven and earth. The Countess stood rigidly as he went forth. Caroline was on her knees, sobbing. CHAPTER XXXIV. A PAGAN SACRIFICE