“Poor Cousin Pamela!” He just pressed her fingers, then gently pushed them away, as if they were a danger. “You must forget him. You are free.” “I was always free. But I went away. I left you for him.” They looked deeply into each other’s eyes. Until that moment they had not trusted themselves to embark on a long, steady gaze. She saw in Jethro’s nothing but intense, almost brotherly, affection and pity. “You might leave me again to go to him?” he asked quietly. “I don’t know--I think, never. But I don’t know--so long as he is alive.” “You are free. But he isn’t. He can’t marry you--can’t make it up to you.” “Can’t make an honest woman of me,” she said, with bitter bluntness. “That is what the women say about here when they force the young men to marry their daughters. No, he cannot. But that would make no difference to me--if he wanted me. He was first. I don’t even hate him. Sometimes I think I am getting indifferent; but I felt like that before, when he was in prison. I never know--unless he dies. That would break the terrible spell.” He looked into her eyes again; he gave her hand a significant grip. They understood each other. They were to be cousins--nothing more. Nothing more was possible--she wasn’t even sure that she desired more, and she feared that he did not. Nothing was possible now. Their love had come to a full stop. He got up, saying: “I’ll go and speak to Gainah. I’ll prepare her. She’s getting old, and surprises upset her.” When he came back, he looked a little stubborn--the old familiar look of rebellion at woman’s tyranny. “She’ll be all right to-morrow,” he said, in answering Pamela’s eloquent querying look. “She’ll be glad to-morrow. You know that her temper’s an odd one.” They dined alone. Everything seemed strange--Jethro so unusually precise in dress and manner, the dining-room so conventionally elegant. CHAPTER XX. AFTER dinner they went back to the drawing-room together. Nettie brought in coffee. She looked at Pamela curiously--with no very good feeling. Her sharp, impudent eyes dropped to the left hand, where Edred’s meaningless ring still gleamed. The look was not lost on Pamela. Directly the maid had left the room she slipped the ring off and put it in her purse. Jethro watched her, keen pity and indignation in his light eyes. “If ever he comes here,” he said grimly, and with the eager instinct of a sportsman, “you must let me settle with him.” “He will never come,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “He took all he wanted from Folly Corner.” “Yes; I shall never see my two hundred pounds again,” the other returned ruefully, and a disagreeable silence fell over the room, the fire standing red on those two painfully tense faces.