As Oliver rose hastily to bid Fan welcome, he saw more plainly than he had yet seen it, and with a sharp pang at the sight, the change in her looks. A small woman to begin with, she was now little more than skin and bone. Her brown eyes appeared a sombre black, set in great shadowy hollows in her white face. The straight firm line of her lips was drooping and quivering. She put her thin hand in Oliver’s and held up her face to be kissed, and spoke without any preamble. ‘I am beaten, Oliver. They say an Englishman never knows when he is beaten, but that is a man, not a woman. Yet did you ever think I would give in with life? and I have given in. I have come to you, not to save me—you tried that once and failed. What did it matter if I might have saved another? only I have not—there’s the rub. I don’t mind myself, and you need not mind me. But you must do something. I tell you, Oliver, you must move heaven and earth to save Harry.’ Her voice rose into a little weak cry. She was like a creature who had lost all command over herself. But it was not so much this reversal of natural law in a woman—by organisation and courage, self-sufficing, self-restrained, rational and resolute—which smote Oliver Constable with dismay and compunction, as if he had been the sinner whose sin was at the bottom of this spectacle, the most pitiable he had ever beheld. It was some comprehension of what Fan must have suffered, of what it had cost this woman—ardent and steadfast as women even more than men can prove themselves—to own herself beaten, to grovel as it were at his knees, and fling herself for help on him of all men, who, though he had been a brother in more than name, had interposed with all his might, without effect, as both of them were well aware, to turn her from the step which had brought her to this pass. He remembered having, more than once in their lives, angrily accused her of being incapable of changing her mind; and—knowing as he had seemed to know her high spirit, unquenchable energy, and unswerving determination—he had been tempted to believe, against right reason, that however mistaken and misplaced her aspirations, or foolish and baseless her dreams, Fan could not be baffled, and would not be vanquished. The end of all was, that she was more thoroughly subdued, presenting a more deplorable object of contemplation, than if she had been a far feebler woman. ‘My God!’ cried Oliver in his heart—moved as he was to its depths when a believing man can but appeal to the Father of his spirit; ‘what must she not have borne to crush her whole being, lay her pride in the dust, extinguish the last spark of hope, and break her heart?’