"I'll never give you up," said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing his character, she felt that he had spoken the truth. He could not give her up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had passed from his brain into the fibre of his being. She had become a habit to him, and not love, but the inability to change, to cease thinking what he had always thought, to break a fixed manner of life, would keep him faithful to her in his heart. "I'm sorry--oh, I'm sorry," she murmured, longing to have it over and to return to Jane and the children. It occurred to her almost resentfully that love was not always an unmixed delight. "Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden choking sound in his voice. "I have sometimes thought--in the last four or five months--that there might be--that you had changed--that--" He stopped abruptly, and she answered him with a beautiful frankness which would have horrified the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother. "There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I mean I think of some one else very often--of some one who isn't in my life at all--from whom I never hear--" "Is it George Fowler?" She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew radiant. "And you have known him less than a year?" Again she bowed her head without speaking. What was there, after all, that she could say in justification of her behaviour? A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest. "And I thought women were more constant than men!" he exclaimed with something of the baffled and helpless feeling which had overtaken Uncle Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella. The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella. "I thought so, too," she observed dispassionately. "I thought so, too, and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when it happened. You yourself aren't more shocked and surprised than I was in the beginning," she added. "But you've got used to the thought, I suppose?" "Well, one has to, you see. What else is there to do? I always understood from mother"--she went on with the same eager interest, as if she were stumbling upon new and important intellectual discoveries--"I always understood that women never fell in love with men first--I mean until they had had positive proof that their love would be returned. But in this case that didn't seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered, and the more I fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the more I found myself being false. It's all very strange," she concluded, "but that is just how it happened." "And he knows nothing about it?" "Oh, no. I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went away." For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so carefully guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious blank look of a statue's, Gabriella could form no idea of the suppressed inarticulate suffering in his heart.