But Michael interrupted him somewhat sternly: 'Hush! hush! You do not know what you are saying. She is your mother, Blake--nothing can alter that fact.' 'She has deceived us all! No, I will not speak; nothing can make it better or worse. If I lose Audrey, I do not care what becomes of me!' Michael looked at him pityingly. 'Do you think you ought to marry her, Blake!' Then Cyril flung away from him with a groan; even in his misery he understood that appeal to his generosity. But he put it from him: he was too much stunned, too dazed altogether, to follow out any train of reasoning. In a vague sort of way he understood two facts: that he and Kester and Mollie were disgraced, and that his mother--the mother whom he adored--had deceived him. Beyond this he could not go. The human mind has limits. Afterwards, in the chill hour of darkness and solitude, Michael's words would come back to him: 'Do you think you ought to marry her, Blake? Do you think you ought to marry her?' CHAPTER XXXVII 'I SHALL NEVER BE FREE' 'But there are true hearts which the sight Of sorrow summons forth; Though known in days of past delight, We know not half their worth.' BAYLY. The words escaped from Michael almost unconsciously; he hardly knew that he spoke them aloud; but in his inner consciousness he had no doubt at all of the course that ought to be pursued. If he had been in Cyril's place he would not have hesitated for a moment. Dearly as he loved Audrey--and what that love was only he himself knew--he would have refused to marry her. He would have separated himself from her utterly, and at once. Michael's strong, long-suffering nature would have carried him nobly through such an ordeal. He was a man who would have acted up to the spirit of the Gospel command 'to pluck out the offending eye, or to cut off the right hand;' there would have been no parleying, no weak dalliance with temptation. 'I love you, but it is my duty to leave you, so farewell for ever!'--that is what he would have said to her, knowing all the time that life would be utterly joyless to him. Would Cyril, in his hot, untried youth, be capable of a like generosity, or would he cleave to his betrothed with passionate, one-sided fealty, vowing that nothing on earth should separate them as long as they two loved each other? 'They will make her give me up!'--that was all he had said. That seemed to be the one deadly terror that assailed him. Cyril had turned away with a groan when Michael spoke, but he made no audible answer, and the next moment his hand was on the door. 'Where are you going, Blake?' inquired Michael anxiously. It was impossible to keep him, and yet, how could he let him leave him in such a condition? 'I must get away from here!' returned Cyril hoarsely. 'I must be alone somewhere.' And Michael understood him.