“When he is dead?” She gives a dry sob. It has come to this, then! She has brought it to this--that what ought to be the prime calamity of the death of him to whom she has owed everything but the bare and dubious gift of life, is to be regarded only as a subsidiary incident in the drama of ruin which she has brought upon them all! “When he is dead!” she repeats automatically; but Rupert treats it as a question. “You will be saddled with me for perhaps fifty years, and”--with a smile, cruel in its gentleness--“I am afraid I am too great a coward to release you by suicide!” She starts as if stung by a hornet; and yet taking to herself a sort of horrible comfort from his words. Yes; that is why she has betrayed him; that is why she has never been able to love him really! He is a coward. He has been telling her so for three and twenty years; and there is no reason for disbelieving him! They have been standing still on the high-road; but now she breaks away from him, walking so fast that it is a moment or two before he overtakes her. In wordless wretchedness they step along side by side, the sweet Babel of evening birds in their ears, the acrid sweetness of hawthorn in their nostrils, and death in their hearts. “Even if I freed you from my presence, as, of course, I should do, there would still be the legal tie,” Rupert resumes presently, in a matter-of-fact voice, whose would-be indifference the dead whiteness of his face and a slight twitching of the lips contradict. “I believe that, under the circumstances, it might be got rid of; but it would involve a publicity that would be painful to you.” She listens dully, so dazed with pain as to feel that he must be talking of some one else. “And if it were _not_ got rid of,” she foggily hears him continue, “it would, of course, shut up any possible avenue to future happiness for you.” At that her great anguish breaks through the merciful fog that has begun to envelop it. “There is no such avenue!” she answers thickly. He glances at her with what looks like compassion. “You think so now, but you will not think so always.” “Always! always!” she repeats choking. He shakes his head as one knowing better. “I am afraid your plan will not hold water,” he rejoins, not irritating her by any _spoken_ contradiction of her asseveration of perpetual woe. “We must think of something more feasible.” His voice is so coolly dispassionate that once again, and for the last time in both their lives, the balm-bringing idea flashes across her that he does not care much after all--that his finicking womanish nature is incapable of the pangs of a great thwarted passion. But one glance at the profile beside her in the lined patience of its self-government, knocks the unworthy prop from under her self-esteem.