“The words were on my lips,” he said, leaning forward, with anxious, earnest face. “You checked them--the evening that you told me of your love. Do you remember?” “Yes, I remember,” she said. Then, after a pause, resuming the mid-thread of her last remark: “But I can understand now from what you have told me of yourself. No, I don’t reproach you.” He threw himself, in an outburst of gratitude, on his knees beside her chair, and seized her hand. “God bless you, Renie. I still have your love.” She withdrew her hand gently. “That is what I don’t know, Hugh. Some you must have, for the boy’s sake. Some because of your tenderness and devotion to me. But what I gave you this morning when you kissed the boy and myself before you started--seems to have gone out of me----” “But, Irene, my beloved,” he urged, with the pathos of ineptitude, “I did it for the best--for the sake of your name and happiness---for the sake of the children that might be--the danger seemed utterly remote--it seemed only taking upon myself the burden of a crime--I never breathed to you a word of the love and longing that tortured me until you showed me that you loved me. And then I took this step--the only dishonourable thing I have done in my life that my conscience approved of. My motives were pure. It was for your happiness.” “I know,” she sighed. “I am not an irrational woman. It was not the selfish motive of having me yours. My reason approves you. But something has stopped in my heart--I don’t know what it is or why it is.” “Time will set it on its old motion again,” he said. “No, I think not. I had the trust in you that a more religious woman has in God. Now it has gone.” “But you tell me your reason approves,” insisted poor Hugh. “Faith is on a different plane from reason. I am hurting you. It goes to my heart to do it. But I can’t pretend.” Hugh rose, and, stooping over her, kissed her forehead. “I will leave you to yourself to-day, if you wish it.” “You would be doing me a kindness, Hugh,” she replied. He left her, and betook himself to the library of his club, where, surrounding himself with books and sheets of manuscript, he made a pretence of work a barrier against intrusive acquaintances. Irene went upstairs to the nursery, and, dismissing the nursemaid, took the boy on her lap, and drew her arms tightly round him. The tears came from an overfull heart and trickled down upon the chubby cheek. He disengaged himself and looked her in the face, and then, reminiscent of a lugubrious story that Susan had been telling him: “Is daddy dead?” he asked with cheerful sympathy. “No, darling. He----” She could not say more. A lump rose in her throat. “Then why are you crying, mummy? Have you been naughty?” She laughed, caught him to her breast again. “We are all miserable sinners, Hughie, save you. And you are the dearest mother’s angel that ever lived.”