"Ah! you needn't mind," Lizzie said grimly. "He's never seen anything of it. You must never give him any reason to suspect--I trust you for that. No one in this world knows but you, and you should never have known if it had not been that I _had_ to prove my right to interfere. Perhaps even now, you don't see that I _have_ a right, but whether I have one or no, you've got to reckon with me now----" "And _you've_ got to reckon," Rachel answered, with some of Lizzie's own fierceness, "with a power that's beyond your power or mine or anyone's. Don't you imagine that we, all of us, haven't tried hard enough. Why! all these last two years we've done nothing but try. Now it's simply stronger than we are. If Roddy," she went on, speaking now more slowly, "hadn't forced it.... If he'd not been impatient--but now--after what's just happened, it's right--it isn't fair to him, to myself, to any of us, that things should go on as they are----" "I'm thinking," Lizzie answered quietly, "simply of Francis Breton." "Well! isn't it fairer too for him? He's been living, as we have, all this time, a life that's denying all his own _real_ self. Anything's better than being false to that--life may be hard for us if we go away together, but at any rate it will be honest----" "Ah! that just shows how young you are! Don't I know that pursuit of truth and honesty as well as you? Don't I know that when life's beginning for us, the one thing that seems to matter is exposing ourselves, showing ourselves to the world just as we are! At first it seems such an easy thing--Just round that corner the moment's coming when the real person in us is going to stand up and proclaim itself just as it is, fine and splendid? but always something just comes in the way and stops it--the years go on and we're further off from truth than ever. "You think that if you go off with Francis Breton now, you'll, both of you, be leading, suddenly, honest brave lives before the world. I tell you it isn't so. Things will be just as crooked, just as shadowed--issues just as confused--it will be worse than it was." "But you don't know----"