“If you ask me to speak out honestly, then I don’t think he really did! He is not what is called a marrying man.... Now you will of course never be able to forgive me.... Let us both go to bed now at any rate--I am quite worn out!” She turned aside wearily, and passed through the portière, letting her hand drag after her, as she went. Mrs. Elles’s vexation at her plain speaking died before a more generous instinct of gratitude to the woman who had befriended her in her need. She caught hold of the fugitive hand---- “Oh, don’t leave me like this; indeed, you are my best friend. Thank you, thank you--for telling me the truth. I ought to know it.” “It is only my opinion!” said the other, suffering herself, however, to be drawn into the room again, by the insistent tenderness of her rival, which touched her, and made her feel a brute. “Yes,” Mrs. Elles went on sadly. “Only your opinion, but you have known him so very much longer than I have.” She would have been equal to the mental sacrifice of adding, “and so much more intimately,” but hardly dared, lest it was taken, not as a compliment but as an impertinence. “I only saw him for a month, and even in that time I could not help loving him--adoring him.... How could anyone help it? Could you?” “No,” Egidia murmured under her breath, too much moved to resent the question. “It is just those very silent men whom every one adores,” the other went on. “But he always preferred his art to me. I knew it at the time, only I was so blinded. Then when he realized that he was compromising me, he did the honourable thing, and proposed. Of course I don’t suppose he thought me quite impossible, he felt it would be just bearable to be married to me, if he had to be married, but he had never meant to be married, as you say. But you must see, that if I come to think that, how very much more humiliating it makes it for me--how painful to have to think that one was only proposed to out of pity and a sense of duty!” She turned her face away, sobbing. Egidia put her arm round her. She could unfeignedly sympathise with the very real sorrows of wounded vanity. She felt she had spoken plainly--with full conviction and honest intent, it was true, but still plainly and perhaps brutally. She was conscious that her care had been all along for the man, and not the woman. “My dear, my dear,” she said, drawing Mrs. Elles close to her, “there is another thing I see--that saves it a little--a good deal, I think!” “What?” asked Phœbe Elles. “You don’t really love him either!” “What, not love him?”