There is a terrible silence--at least, it seems so to them--though the nightingale, scarcely scared, and having taken but a short flight to the branch of a youngling chestnut, is finishing his epithalamium with even bettered music. The reinstated judges have taken their seats, and are holding a dread assize. “It is only I who am to blame!” says Lavinia, by-and-by, in a key a little above her former one. “_You_ did really struggle. If I had helped you honestly, you would have pulled through; but I did not. I never really meant you to hold out! I see now that I meant it all along to happen! I meant you to kiss me! I thought--God forgive me!--that I should be able to bear my life better afterwards if you did!” “If I had been honest,” he says hoarsely, “shouldn’t I have accepted your offer of taking me to the Rectory? You know you _did_ offer. If I had meant honestly, should I have come _here_?” casting a glance of despairing reproach round at the blue and green and silver accessories to his fall--smiling water and curtsying sedge and sky-coloured blue-bells. “But _I_ brought you here!” cries the other culprit, in a heart-rending eagerness, of which he will not suffer her to have the monopoly--to assume all the weight of their “most mutual” lapse. “It was a pity that Bill did not leave the Boers to finish me!” Then there is silence again. This time it is the man who breaks it, though his tone is so low as to constitute scarcely an infringement of the crushing guilty stillness. “And you will still marry him this day week?” At that she veils her face with both hands. “What am I?” she says indistinctly, through the relief of their shield. “What have I become? I have lived for twenty-three years, and I never suspected that there was a bad woman inside me!” “And for twenty-eight years I have imagined that I was a gentleman!” CHAPTER XVII “Even thus two friends condemned Embrace and kiss and take a thousand leaves, Loather a hundred times to part than die; Yet now farewell, and farewell Life with thee.”