"It might be," she said, sadly. "But it wouldn't happen. I know more of myself--now. This has made me know myself--as I never did. I should wound and distress you. And to struggle with you would make me hard--and bad." Another silence. But for both it was one of those silences when the mind, as it were, reaps at one stroke a whole harvest of ideas and images which, all unconsciously to itself, were standing ready to be reaped; the silences, more active far than speech, which determine life. At the end of it, he came to sit beside her. "Then we must give it up--we must give it up. I bless you for the happiness you gave me--this little while. I pray God to bless you--now and forever." Sobbing, she lifted her face to him, and he kissed her for the last time. She slipped off her engagement ring and gave it to him. He looked at it with a sad smile, pressed his lips to it, and then stooping down, he took a stick lying by the log, and scooped out a deep hole in the mossy, fibrous earth. Into it he dropped the ring, covering it again with all the leafy "rubble and wreck" of the wood. He covered his eyes for a moment, and rose. "Let me take you home. I will write to Lady Coryston to-night." They walked silently through the wood, and to the house. Never, in her whole life, had Marcia felt so unhappy. And yet, already, she recognized what she had done as both inevitable and past recall. They parted, just with a lingering look into each other's eyes, and a piteous murmur from her: "I'm sorry!--oh, I'm _sorry_!" At the moment when Marcia and Newbury were crossing the formal garden on the west front of the house, one of two persons in Lady Coryston's sitting-room observed them. These persons were--strange to say--Lady Coryston and her eldest son. Lady Coryston, after luncheon, had felt so seriously unwell that she had retired to her sitting-room, with strict injunctions that she must be left alone. Sir Wilfrid and Lester started on a Sunday walk; Marcia and Newbury had disappeared. The house, through all its innumerable rooms and corridors, sank into deep silence. Lady Coryston was lying on her sofa, with closed eyes. All the incidents of her conversation with Enid Glenwilliam were running perpetually through her mind--the girl's gestures and tones--above all the words of her final warning. After all it was not she--his mother--who had done it. Without her it would have happened all the same. She found herself constantly putting up this plea, as though in recurrent gusts of fear. Fear of whom?--of Arthur? What absurdity! Her proud spirit rebelled.