Madame de Châteauvieux was tremblingly silent, her thoughts travelling back over the past with lightning rapidity. Could she remember one word, one look of Isabel Bretherton's, of which her memory might serve to throw the smallest ray of light on this darkness in which Eustace seemed to be standing? No, not one. Gratitude, friendship, esteem--all these had been there abundantly, but nothing else, not one of those many signs by which one woman betrays her love to another! She rose and put her arm round her brother's neck. They had been so much to one another for nearly forty years; he had never wanted anything as a child or youth that she had not tried to get for him. How strange, how intolerable, that this toy, this boon, was beyond her getting! Her mute sympathy and her deep distress touched him, while, at the same time, they seemed to quench the last spark of hope in him. Had he counted upon hearing something from her whenever he should break silence which would lighten the veil over the future? It must have been so, otherwise why this sense of fresh disaster? 'Dear Marie,' he said to her, kissing her brow as she stood beside him, 'you must be as good to me as you can. I shall probably be a good deal out of London for the present, and my books are a wonderful help. After all, life is not all summed up in one desire, however strong. Other things are real to me--I am thankful to say. I shall live it down.' 'But why despair so soon?' she cried, rebelling against this heavy acquiescence of his and her own sense of hopelessness. 'You are a man any woman might love. Why should she not pass from the mere friendly intellectual relation to another? Don't go away from London. Stay and see as much of her as you can.' Kendal shook his head. 'I used to dream,' he said huskily, 'of a time when failure should have come, when she would want some one to step in and shield her. Sometimes I thought of her protected in my arms against the world. But now!' She felt the truth of his unspoken argument--of all that his tone implied. In the minds of both the same image gathered shape and distinctness. Isabel Bretherton in the halo of her great success, in all the intensity of her new life, seemed to her and to him to stand afar off, divided by an impassable gulf from this simple, human craving, which was crying to her, unheard and hopeless, across the darkness. CHAPTER VIII