At last Jean raised her head from its resting-place and her eyes searched Blaise’s face, asking the question she could no longer bring herself to put in words. He met their gaze. “Jean, is it your wish I do this thing--take Nesta back?” He felt a shudder run through her frame. Twice she tried ineffectually to answer. At last she forced her dry lips to utter an affirmative. “So be it.” His answer sounded in her ears like the knell to the whole meaning of life. The future was settled. Henceforth their lives must lie apart. “So be it,” said Blaise. “She shall come back and take her place again at Staple.” Jean clung to him a little closer. “Blaise, beloved--I know the harder part will be yours. But mine won’t be easy, dear. I shall go to Charnwood to be with Claire at once--to-morrow--and it won’t be easy, when I see in an evening the lights twinkle up at Staple, to know that you two are within, shut in from the world together, while I’m outside--always outside your life and your love.” “You’ll never be outside my love,” he said swiftly. “That’s yours, now and forever. And no other woman shall rob you of one jot or tittle of it, were she my wife twenty times over. I will bring Nesta back to Staple, and she shall bear my name and live as my wife in the eyes of the world. But my love--that is yours, utterly and entirely. Yours and no other’s.” She lifted her face to his, and their lips met in a kiss that was the seal of love and all love’s faithfulness. “So is mine yours,” she said. “How and forever, in this world and the next. Oh, Blaise--beloved!”--she clung to him in a passion of love and anguish and straining belief--“Some day, surely, in that other world, God will give us freedom to take our happiness!” CHAPTER XXXIII--THE RETURNING TIDE TWO months had elapsed since Fate’s dividing sword had fallen, forever separating Jean from the man she loved, and the subsequent march of events, with the many changes involved and the bitter loneliness of soul entailed, had made the two months seem to her more like two years. She had left Staple for Charnwood on the day following that of Madame de Varigny’s visit. It was no longer possible for her to remain under the same roof with Blaise, where the enforced strain of meeting each other daily, and of endeavouring to behave as though nothing more than mere commonplace friendship linked them together, would have been too great for either of them to endure even for the few remaining days which still intervened before the date originally planned for her departure.